Shortly after 178 physicians in Ontario signed a letter to Ontario’s Minister of Health requesting a basic income, the Canadian Medical Association as a whole decided to endorse the idea at its General Council.
Ontario delegate Dr. Kieran Moore raised the motion for a basic income guarantee, and Dr. Adam Steacie seconded the motion, leading to a vote where the motion passed with a sizable majority, according to Danyaal Raza on twitter. This continues the nationwide momentum for a basic income throughout Canada.
Having advocated some form of Universal Basic Income, and equally or perhaps more importantly, how best to pay for it, for well over forty years, I wish to add a few comments to this conversation regarding the necessary contribution to the betterment of all life on our potentially pleasant Spaceship Earth.
Socioeconomic Democracy is offered as a peaceful, effective and democratic resolution to humanity’s past, present and needless systemic problems. The crucial question is whether humanity has yet evolved sufficiently to understand and peacefully eliminate the utterly unnecessary obstacles to further healthy development and evolution.
Socioeconomic Democracy (SeD) is a theoretically consistent and peacefully implementable psycho-politico-socio-economic system wherein there exist both some form and amount of locally appropriate Universally Guaranteed Personal Income (UGI) and some form and amount of locally appropriate Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth (MAW), with both the lower bound on guarantee personal income and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted periodically and democratically by all participants of a democratic society.
Socioeconomic Democracy is easily implemented with elementary Public Choice Theory. The median values of society’s preference distributions regarding these two crucial societal parameters peacefully, democratically and unambiguously resolve the matter. An alternative to Socioeconomic Democracy as defined above would be where the two economic boundaries were considered and established by, say, the legislative branch of a “Representative” Democracy.
A Bibliography of Socioeconomic Democracy is available at: http://www.centersds.com/biblio.htm