by Karl Widerquist | Sep 10, 2012 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
You reach a milestone the first time you or your organization is named the mastermind behind a vast government conspiracy that goes all the way up to the President of the United States. This happened to the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) on July 23, 2012, when an opinion piece by J. D. Longstreet on The Right Side News website declared that the ultimate aim of the Obama administration’s “Socialist/Marxist” conspiracy is to establish exactly the kind of policy described on the USBIG website. The article actually used several long—properly cited—quotes from the USBIG website to describe Obama’s unspoken goal.
As the author of many of the quotes that website took from USBIG, it was a lot of fun to read my words used to describe the hidden agenda of the President of the United States. My sympathies are closer to the Green Party than the Democrats. But if Obama has secretly engineered his entire political career to put my words into actions, well, gee wiz, the least I could do is vote for him. The website states, “Our goal is to provide accurate news and information about threats to our country and Western civilization, and to provide you with the opportunity to counter these threats.” Even with this assurance, unfortunately, I don’t think the Obama administration is a vast conspiracy to do USBIG’s bidding. Obama never calls.
Although this is the first time (I know of) that the USBIG website has caught the attention of conspiracy theorists, it is not the first time that BIG has caught their attention. Longstreet’s conspiracy theory is based on a theory Glenn Beck proposed on Fox news a few years ago. Beck reached way back to a 1966 article, in which Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward discussed the large number of people who were eligible for public assistance but had not applied for it. They argued for (and later became part of) a movement to get eligible people to sign up for welfare benefits, partly in hope that the financial pressure of new applicants would lead to a streamlined federal welfare system hopefully employing a basic income guarantee. Nearly 35 years later Glenn Beck decided that this published paper was the secret objective of an on-going conspiracy to bankrupt the federal government and bring about some kind of socialist revolution.
Longstreet writes, “If I am correct, then we are actually seeing the ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ at work. We are observing the foundation, the groundwork — if you will — for establishing a guaranteed annual (minimum) income for American citizens. It is very, very, worrisome. But — it is only the latest move by our socialist leaders to break America so they can re-mold her in the image of their choosing, which is, unarguably a socialist/Marxist state.”
It’s easy to dismiss the Right Side News as the lunatic fringe of the extreme right, which it probably is. But their rhetoric is not that different from what one can hear on Fox News and many other mainstream media outlets on a regular basis. It is symptomatic of how far divorced America’s political discourse is from the political reality. Over the last 30 years or more, the U.S. welfare system has been slowly but consistently dismantled. The minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. Individuals’ rights to organize unions have been reduced. Taxes on the wealthy have fallen while government favors for the wealthy have increased. Wages have stagnated for 30 years despite healthy economic growth over the period, the benefits of which have been captured almost entirely by the richest few percent of Americans. Yet, somehow a large part of the American populace lives under the belief that we have been moving toward socialism.
It’s fine to label the Obama administration’s policies “socialist” (or to throw any other label on them you want), and it’s fine to believe the Obama administration’s policies are wrong. But if the mild piecemeal policies of the Obama administration are socialist, the United States has been socialist since the Theodore Roosevelt administration and it has been drifting away from socialism since the early 1980s at the latest.
Wild conspiracy theories, like the one by Beck and Longstreet, are part of a brand of fact-denying conservatism that has recently made its way into mainstream U.S. politics. One can now expect to be taken seriously while claiming global warming isn’t happening, the Earth is only 6,000 years old, Obama is a secret Muslim, and so on. Someone paying only casual attention to the mainstream media in the United States could easily think all of these are live, debatable issues. We can hope that such obvious fact-deniers will eventually hang themselves. But we should also be aware that repeating the ridiculous can make it respectable. We have to continually call-out the fact-deniers. The only way to fight falsehoods is with facts.
-Karl Widerquist, begun in New York, NY, completed in South Bend, IN, August 2012
If you’re interested in seeing Longstreet’s editorial on the Right Side News, go to:
https://www.rightsidenews.com/2012072316711/editorial/us-opinion-and-editorial/a-guaranteed-minimum-income-in-the-us.html
by Guest Contributor | Jul 16, 2012 | Opinion
In December of 2010, CBS aired a segment of 60 Minutes in which reporter Scott Pelley asked Chairman Ben Bernanke a question about the bailout money provided to banks during the 2008 fiasco: Pelley asked, “Is it tax money the Fed is spending?” Bernanke replied, “It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing.” “You’ve been printing money?” Pelley asked. “Well, effectively,” Bernanke said.
Did you get that? The Chairman just told us that money is created out of thin air or rather is created with digital entries. When I first learned of fiat currency, I remembered a question my mom used to ask: “do you think money grows on trees?” Now, I would answer, “they don’t even need the paper from trees!” Maybe, just maybe, we need to educate ourselves about the creation of money—otherwise, we become like a child who cannot count, staring uncertainly at the coins returned to us by a store clerk with no means to determine whether or not we are short-changed.
Warren Mosler, a former Wall Street investment banker, has a book available at no cost on line called Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy. In that book, he describes how the system truly works—how fiat money is created to cover the needs of the U.S. government by the Federal Reserve by simply adding digits to accounts. Mosler points out that when the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971, a new monetary system came into play, yet many of the old gold standard rules continued to operate. Some economists, mainly at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, subscribe to this theory, referring to it as Modern Monetary Theory. They have a web site called New Economic Perspectives with contributors such as Bill Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.
If Mosler’s description of how our monetary system really works is correct, then the following holds:
- The United States is a sovereign money creator; it is not like the states within the United States or Greece or Spain, who are all currency users. This means that the United States can never run out of dollars, as it simply creates them when necessary. It can never default on a debt unless intentionally–as when the Republicans tried to make a point (when they held out on raising the debt ceiling and simply refused to pay). It will always have the ability to pay. (All the Chicken Littles were running around screaming that our credit rating would be downgraded, and it would cost more to borrow. Yet when Standard and Poors downgraded the U.S. from four stars to three, the cost of interest on treasuries went down).
- Since the U.S. is a currency creator, it does not need your tax dollars or mine (or money from the Chinese or our grandchildren) to fund anything. It needs tax dollars to cool off the economy. As Mosler says, think of deficit spending as the spigot in the bathtub—think of taxes as the drain. Taxes become a way to limit someone’s buying power so that the tub doesn’t overflow (inflation). The political question now becomes whose buying power shall we limit—not how can we make everyone pay “their fair share”—an absurdity under the current system.
- The debt? Well, it simply represents all the money created to date by the U.S., and that money actually resides in the bank accounts of the private sector. If you quench the debt, you have to call that money back, which will lead to a recession/depression.
Mosler calls for a payroll tax holiday. As he points out, the FICA tax is a highly regressive tax, and is totally unnecessary. Medicare and Social Security should be funded just as the wars and all other government expenditures are funded. Mosler says that the creators of the Social Security gave it the moniker “Trust Fund” as a “useful fiction.” They understood that how you get people to think of a thing makes a difference in whether or not they will accept it.
If the American people understood how our fiat system worked, they would no longer feel like it was their tax dollars supporting someone on the “dole.” They could see through false analogies such as comparing the U.S. government (currency creator) with the theoretical mom and pop around the kitchen table (currency users) struggling to pay their debts. They would be more inclined to reduce the buying power of those who actually have buying power, and more inclined to give buying power to those who do not now have it. In such an atmosphere, I think BIG would be more acceptable as the moral hurdles now thrown at it would be far less. Given the current lies and deceptions about the economy, it will be all we can do to keep Social Security and Medicare intact. Unless something is done to educate the American people as to the true nature of the economy, the “austerity” plans that Simpson/Bolles/Peterson/Ryan advocate will be implemented—bringing more unnecessary suffering and make any hopes for BIG a pipe dream.
For more on Modern Monetary Theory go to:
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/
-Phoenix
by Guest Contributor | Jul 9, 2012 | Opinion
D.R. Thompson
I have watched with quiet fascination the evolution/resurgence of alternative politics since the financial meltdown of 2008. In my opinion, we have (at least) two broad camps developing: a Ron Paul brand of libertarianism that seeks to return to a prior vision of capitalism lost, and a new brand of Economic Democrat (often reflected in the Occupy Movement and/or Green Party or the ‘New Economy’ movement) that seeks a balance between capitalism as we know it and the people at large, who are more often than not suffering the brunt of capitalism run amok.
Both factions are reacting to an increasing corrupt two-party system that sees Big Business allied with Big Government. The result is an alliance that destroys the middle class, promotes elitist globalism devoid of democratic oversight, increases the power of the security state, enriches the upper one percent of society with corporate welfare, and engenders corporate socialism through unsustainable monetary policies. The result sections society into an increasingly enriched, globally based upper echelon that guts the wealth of whole nations and peoples.
How this has happened we may disagree on, but both factions are in firm unity that we have arrived at this situation and it has been slowly developing the past 30 to 40 years.
The question is, of course, what do to about it. This essay seeks to dissect some of the ideas behind Economic Democracy, and then to suggest how libertarians and other de-centralists actually might see benefit in them.
In my mind, libertarians in general need to grasp the fundamental contradiction that a Ron Paul style of political shift — specifically one that is devoid of actions to directly break up monopolistic, duopolistic or cartel-like aspects of Big Business — could devolve into a neo-feudalistic scenario where large corporations essentially create corporate fiefdoms through which transnational factions evolve and compete. This could mean less, not more, liberty. In other words, some aspects of libertarian policies could have the exact opposite impact than what is intended and actually just hand power over to the big corporate interests they so often rail against. This new level of corporate power would likely not make us any more free and continue — even expand — the cycle of abuse seen today.
On the other side of the equation, the alternative of centrally planned, top down governance, if taken to the extreme, would create a kind of global fascism that stifles innovation, punishes individualism, guts individual wealth and undermines democratic sovereignty. We don’t want that either.
My argument here is that we can avoid these extremes by recognizing that each political pole must understand the logical limits of its own zeitgeist and determine at what level of society a particular philosophy or approach will work best for the overall benefit of people. This often comes down to understanding what is best centralized and/or cooperative in nature, and what is best left to individual choice and freedom.
In my mind, a centrally planned, cooperatively managed government enterprise is best used to develop the infrastructure upon which a free, democratic, innovative and entrepreneurial society flourishes. Examples of how this can work are numerous: the Interstate Highway System, National Airspace System, the Internet (based on the government’s DARPAnet), and the standardized Electric Grid.
We should translate the same thinking to a rethought national financial infrastructure that provides a basic income guarantee (BIG) and sufficient monies to develop new energy technologies and ensure they are put widely into use. All of this could be done through a Cooperative Central Bank that is government sanctioned but subject to democratic input from its citizen members. Ideally, bank policies and programs would be managed by a board that is in turn subject to democratic approval.
Basic Income Guarantee
A universal basic income that provides a simplified social safety net and replaces Social Security, welfare and unemployment benefits, would ideally be provided to all adults with no required means test, even while the upper tier income brackets are still taxed. In point of fact basic income programs exist to a certain degree already with our large-scale pool of veterans (with their benefits), the earned income tax credit, Social Security and ever-extended unemployment benefits. It is a well-known fact that over 50% of Americans already pay no income tax. Templates for a BIG already exist in the Alaska Permanent Fund and the recently enacted basic income guarantee in Brazil. In this country, Social Security is the model we can build on; we could move toward a basic income by expanding that program, or implementing, as suggested by Robert Reich, a reverse income tax.
If you believe the idea of a basic income has no support, I urge you to do a quick Internet search and you will be astounded by the array of individuals that has supported a BIG throughout history, including Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, Daniel Moynihan, and John Kenneth Galbraith, just to name a few.
Rather than perennially watch the upper 1% obtain high earnings in ever more unjust, cynical and/or demeaning ways, it’s time to fight for a BIG and higher minimum wages for everyone. The reason: Americans earned almost 57% more per hour 40 years ago when accounting for inflation, even as productivity has continually increased. The situation continues to deteriorate and must be turned around.
We all agree that the reason for wage stagnation is not that people are lazy. It is that trade and labor policies of the last 40 years have allowed it to occur even as overall productivity has increased substantially, based primarily on automation. A BIG simply recognizes these productivity gains are at least in part an overriding social benefit rather than solely a corporate benefit channeled toward investors.
Put another way, a BIG allows us to simplify what we have and admit that we need a universal requirement that will provide a sound foundation for social stability and income equity within an efficient, technologically based society. We need to fully grasp that while a modern society should always offer the opportunity to work, automation makes it possible — even desirable — that all do not need to work (in the traditional sense), even among those groups we have historically felt should work. Simply put, we need to redefine the term ‘productive.’ ‘Productive’ can mean doing something that one loves and has a passion for, rather than working for an employer. A basic income can allow this to happen on a wide scale. As robotics and software continue to evolve and eliminate a plethora of even more jobs, the end result need not need to be chronic unemployment; with a BIG we can empower people to choose to work or not, thus leveling the playing field in the relationship between labor and capital.
While some would argue this is a statist utopia at its worst, as such a program would be run by the Federal Government, I beg to differ. My first question is: why does it need to be a Federal Program? Is the Federal Reserve ‘federal’? Most understand it isn’t: it is privately owned.
What we can do therefore is to turn the Fed on its head by creating a completely transparent, citizen-owned, Internet-ran, Cooperative Central Bank that is separate from (although approved by) the Federal Government and can print money into existence for two primary reasons: a BIG, and infrastructure (discussed below). All adult citizens could be a member of the cooperative. What can back such money? The physical infrastructure itself, including public lands and assets. In other words, we either have or can build the assets and provide liquidity as we go. This new form of debt-free money would be an alternative to Federal Reserve Notes and could complement other forms of new currency (i.e., Treasury Notes) that would be backed by other forms of assets (i.e. Gold). While some would argue that Cooperative Banking should remain only at the local community, the Internet has re-shaped our concept of what ‘community’ is. In short, globalization and technology has made ‘national’ the new local.
The template for a Cooperative Central Bank already exists in the National Cooperative Bank established in 1978 under President Carter. Perhaps that bank’s mission just needs to be rethought and expanded. Also, while different in their mandate, some states have already implemented Cooperative Central Banks that become the ‘bank of banks’ to cooperative banks throughout that state. Countries that have implemented Cooperative Central Banking can also be looked to as models. Moreover, some writers, such as Richard Cook, even lobby for an international bank with a similar mandate as stipulated in this essay, based on a reformed International Monetary Fund.
A key mandate of Central Banks during the economic crisis has been to provide ‘liquidity.’ But rather than provide liquidity through quantitative easing (where the Federal Reserve purchases Government Debt directly, often from ‘too big to fail’ banks), that inevitably channels any wealth to the top while driving inflation at the bottom, non-debt money generated through a new Cooperative Central Bank could provide another flavor of liquidity in a way that benefits the general population instead of primarily channeling those gains toward the elites.
A Wider Net of Social Security
If we are honest, most Americans, even staunch conservatives, appreciate the modest guarantees of Social Security for elderly Americans and would grow to appreciate a BIG that would empower the individual and, ironically to some, create more independence in the same way that Social Security allows for many seniors today to be more independent. While we may idealize some agrarian form of the independent ‘gentleman farmer’ as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson or a survivalist as envisioned by Thoreau, in our modern age any lack of income (whether urban or rural) simply generates suffering, ill-health, malnutrition, and a variety of other socially negative outcomes. A basic income, particularly when complemented by a well-thought out Healthcare system and other incentives toward positive outcomes, could alleviate such problems. If we steer education intelligently, and human inventiveness and entrepreneurship are promoted, bottom up endeavors can be nurtured in a variety of altruistic and productive ways, using a BIG as the foundation.
For the nostalgic among us who wish to return to some ideal world of very limited government and no intrusive Powers that Be, we need to remember something about the history of life prior to the advent of our current (albeit admittedly corrupted) modern societies. Life was short, and it was brutish. To the extent human beings can cooperate together to alleviate overall suffering, they should. And technology makes that possible. Why shouldn’t we use the benefits of that technology for the overall good? What is the alternative? An atomized society of iPad-toting survivalists dodging the bullets of those that choose to organize, probably via transnational large-scale businesses? I don’t believe such a neo-feudal world is desirable. We joke today that Apple is as large as a country. If we move down a libertarian path it won’t be a joke: Apple will make internal laws and provide security for its people if nation states cannot.
Green Energy Infrastructure
Another potential use of non-debt money generated through a Cooperative Central Bank is to create a green energy infrastructure, where the Central Bank could work with local cooperative banks to fund a multitude of sustainable energy projects. Regardless of where you stand on ‘climate change,’ a sustainable, clean, long-term energy infrastructure is a good thing. And again, the idea would be to ‘back’ the money with the asset created, i.e., the green infrastructure that creates the sustainable energy environment that could be the foundation on which long-term prosperity and entrepreneurial activity are built. The infrastructure would be publicly owned (perhaps by State) and corporations charged fees to use it. These use fees could then be channeled back into maintenance and any ‘profits’ toward a basic income in the form of a citizen’s dividend, just as in Alaska oil revenues are channeled back into the Permanent Fund.
Some of you are probably laughing that all of this is absolutely unaffordable and inflationary. But if we significantly downsized the military (something both Economic Democrats and Libertarians certainly agree on) and aggressively sought ways to create global treaties to outlaw open aggression, the energy and resources expended on maintaining the security state and Global US empire could be effectively channeled into more productive long-term objectives through a Cooperative Central Bank and a green infrastructure initiative geared toward fully integrating efficient, non-polluting energy technologies into our economies. Moreover, the Bank could be managed soundly through a systems approach so that expenditures would be monitored carefully and inflation kept in check. Certain levels of income could still be taxed, and fees for corporate resource utilization could be expanded.
We can look back to the New Deal infrastructure projects of the WPA, many of which are still used today by millions of people, as examples of intelligently channeled social energy into long-term infrastructure.
Simplification and Common Ground
The proposals above, including a new Cooperative Central Bank, Basic Income Guarantee, and Green Infrastructure development could be done in tandem with simplifying Federal Government as we know it. Agencies could be eliminated or downsized. Regulations that stifle innovation could be thrown out or rethought.
As a rule, the overriding mission statement of promoting the general welfare of the people should be revisited and integrated into every facet of government.
But can Economic Democrats find common ground with libertarians?
I believe Libertarians and Economic Democrats can agree to the following:
- Empower entrepreneurs
- Simplify government and make it more effective
- Downsize the military, repeal the Patriot Act and roll back Homeland Security
- Allow for alternative currencies to Federal Reserve Notes that are backed by Gold and/or Infrastructure
- Rethink the role of the Federal Reserve in monetary policy
- Simplify, not eliminate, the social safety net
- Support infrastructure with an eye toward sustainable business growth and prosperity, using resources such as https://m247.com/ to achieve this
- Support BIGness when it’s Goodness
By focusing proposals for Economic Democracy on the level of financial and energy infrastructure, we reconcile the two camps by allowing on one hand a cooperative, aggressive and activist stance that allows for a fair and sustainable economic system that promotes the general welfare, but on the other hand maintains a free and entrepreneurial business environment that can make use of that infrastructure in a fashion that is relatively unencumbered and free.
All of these shared stances I believe could be the basis for common ground where Economic Democrats and Libertarians come to agreement regarding a future America we can all feel good about.
About the author: D.R. Thompson is an award-winning film producer, playwright and essayist. He has also ‘done time’ on Wall Street. A compilation of his essays, A WORLD WITHOUT WAR, is available from Del Sol Press.
by Guest Contributor | Jul 2, 2012 | Opinion
At the North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress in Toronto, which I attended in May 2012, Charles Karelis, author of The Persistence of Poverty, demonstrated what is wrong with much thinking about poverty, using a simple analogy. Suppose you are stung by a bee, and you are offered enough salve to relieve the pain of that sting. Most people would consider that daub of salve to be worth quite a bit. Now suppose you have 7 other bee stings. Will you still value a daub of salve sufficient to relieve one sting as much as you did when you had only one sting? If you think about it, you will value that one daub less, because it will do nothing to relieve the 7 other stings that remain. Now suppose with these 8 stings that you are given salve for 7 stings. Now you have increased motivation to relieve the one sting that remains, because that additional daub will free you from pain. This simple example is an important exception to a widely accepted principle of economics, the principle of declining marginal utility (PDMU). According to the PDMU, the more you have of something, the less each additional unit is worth at the margin. For example, after you have had one piece of cake, the second is worth less to you than the first, and after two, a third is worth even less. PDMU applies well to what Karelis calls “pleasers,” like the dessert example. But it does not apply to what he calls “relievers,” like the sting salve. In the case of relievers, the more you have of something, the more an additional unit is worth at the margin. The utility of that last daub of salve is worth more to you, not less, than the first daub, because the last daub is the one that gets you out of misery.
Now it turns out that many of the goods that matter to poor people are relievers, not pleasers, or they are hybrids, functioning like relievers when one has less than enough, and like pleasers once one crosses a threshold of sufficiency. Transportation is an example of a hybrid. If you have a 20-mile journey to work, you are not apt to pay bus fare for the first mile of the journey, leaving 19 miles to go on foot. But you might well be willing to pay bus fare to relieve you of the last mile after having walked 19. And transportation beyond what you need declines in value.
Poverty means troubles, and like multiple bee stings, these troubles drown each other out. Relief from one problem will not necessarily be pursued by someone if she is left in other troubles. If we keep this in mind, Karelis argued, we can explain much of the behavior of poor people, not as due to some character defect, but rather as what any reasonable person would do in such circumstances. Consider low work effort. If money from work were a pleaser then the first dollar should be the most valuable, and a rational person should be eager for work, no matter how poorly paid. But if money from work is only a reliever, as it is for someone in poverty, then that first dollar won’t be worth much, like the first daub of salve, since it leaves one in a sea of troubles.
Or consider a failure to save. Saving makes sense as a means of deferring consumption, and as a way of insuring for unexpected shocks to one’s income from layoffs, illness, emergency home repairs, etc. But when one’s current consumption is taken up with basic needs, the value of deferred consumption is much less. And it may be more rational to address the ups and downs of income shocks than to try to smooth out these shocks through saving. Going back to the bee sting analogy, suppose you are getting two stings a day, but have only enough salve for, on average, one sting per day? Are you going to relieve only one sting every day, or relieve two stings, every other day? The latter makes more sense, but it is the opposite of the smoothing out strategy that saving makes possible. Yet it is more reasonable, given that one is dealing with relievers.
What are the policy implications of this analysis? Karelis argued that a guaranteed income would be counterproductive for people who are not poor, as it would undermine work motivation. However, a negative income tax, guaranteeing income up to the poverty line, would actually increase the incentives for a poor person to get out of poverty. It would supply the reliever goods up the point where the additional unit of income is worth more, and so in pursuing it one is stepping out of poverty, not remaining stuck in it. The poor are just like everyone else, except that they have less money. Once policy makers begin to understand this, we may begin to shift from our current counterproductive policies of punishing the poor and blaming them for their condition, to an effective strategy that will get people out of poverty.
For further reading, see Charles Karelis, The Persistence of Poverty (Yale University Press, 2007).
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 25, 2012 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
The Eleventh North American Basic Income Guarantee (NA-BIG) Congress took place at the University of Toronto on May 3-5, 2012. I had the privilege of attending this conference. It provided an unusual opportunity for me to go to a NA-BIG Congress purely as a participant, because I had almost nothing to do with the organization of it this year.
The theme of the Congress was “Putting Equality Back on The Agenda: Basic Income and Other Approaches to Economic Security for All.” It began—unusually for a conference primarily dedicated to examining basic income—with two skeptics explaining what was wrong with the basic income as a solution to current problems in the United States and Canada. I applaud these participants for speaking their mind in an auditorium full of basic income supporters. It was kind of strange to begin with the skeptics—rebutting an idea that hadn’t yet been presented at the conference—but it worked very well to keep the basic income supporters on their toes throughout the conference.
The organizers invited two speakers to focus on the problems of poverty and inequality rather than specifically on basic income as a proposed solution: Charles Karelis (Research Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University and author of The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor) and Richard Wilkinson (Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School and co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better). Even though these speakers’ remarks were not directly about basic income, they were valuable to the conference, because they show the need to do something about poverty and inequality in the world today. It’s the work of a conference like this to see if basic income can help solve the problems researchers like these have identified.
One featured speaker, Erik Olin Wright (of the Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, author of Envisioning Real Utopias, and American Society: How it Actually Works), brought the congress back to focus on basic income, but he did not support the common version of the basic income proposal—a basically unregulated economy with basic income as its one central progressive reform. He argued that basic income would only succeed if it were part of a major reform of the economic system.
One of the most pertinent presentations was given by Evelyn Forget (Professor, University of Manitoba Faculty of Medicine, author of a major forthcoming study on Mincome: the Manitoba minimum income experiment). She has been working for several years to recover and analyze data from the Canadian Negative Income Tax experiment, known as Mincome. The experiment was conducted by the Canadian Federal government in the late 1970s, but it was cancelled before the data was analyzed. Only now, thanks mostly to Evelyn Forget, are the findings of the experiment becoming fully available. She finds that the experiment had many benefits for recipients including, for example, improved school attainment among children and improved health outcomes for all family members.
Senator Art Eggleton, former mayor of Toronto, concluded the conference with a practical discussion of how to put BIG on the political agenda in North America.
The parallel sessions provided a wide range of discussion about BIG. These sessions were especially valuable for me because I was able to attend two sessions and a dinner dedicated to providing feedback to me on chapters of the book that I am currently polishing for publication. The book makes a freedom-based argument for an unconditional income from the perspective that the imposition of rules, including the rules of property, make the poor unfree in very important ways. Basic income is both compensation for the imposition of these rules and a necessary institution (in modern industrial society) to maintain each individual’s status as a free person with the power to accept or reject active cooperation with other willing individuals. The sessions I participated in helped me formulate this argument and to present the book as a work of political philosophy.
For me, the Congress was also an opportunity to reconnect with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I have now been to six BIEN Congresses and all eleven NA-BIG Congresses. I believe there are only three of us who have been to all eleven Congresses (the other two being Jeff Smith and Al Sheahen). Every Congress is a little different. Some themes recur every time, but I’m always confronted with new ideas.
One welcome addition to this Congress was the presence of a significant number of people who are on disability or other forms of public assistance. This group brought the discussion back to practical issues every time, providing a skeptical view of nearly all the ideas presented. I hope we can get someone from this group to be a featured speaker at an upcoming NA-BIG or BIEN Congress.
The North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress is a joint project of the USBIG Network and the Canadian Basic Income Guarantee. It takes place in Canada and the United States on alternating years. Next year’s Congress will be in New York City in February (see announcement above).
For more information on this past conference go to:
https://biencanada.ca/
Papers from the Congress will be online as part of the USBIG Discussion Paper Series at:
https://www.usbig.net/papers.php
by Yannick Vanderborght | Jun 11, 2012 | Opinion
Some might know the tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Hans Christian Andersen. The story is about how betrayers sell new clothes to a vain Emperor. As the betrayers insist, the specific qualities of the clothes are such that they could only be seen by the cleverest and bravest people.
Today, the times of Emperors and Kings are almost gone, rather the nation became the sovereign in democracies. Hence, some know the term “Leviathan” used by Thomas Hobbes referring to the biblical-mythological lake monster: A polity in the form of a state as a super organism whose almighty is invincible.
But the old clothes of Leviathan often seem like a tight suffocating corset of a relation web made by lobbies. That is why the relatively new Pirate Party in Europe demands politics be made more transparent. They claim to tie a new dress for Leviathan. Thus, a new web of relations and power emerges, but in contradiction to other parties, it should show sympathies and antipathies more transparently.
Before the Pirates also other parties appeared more or less successful with the same desire to make politics more different and better. The common purpose is to care for the welfare of Leviathan. In principle the whole political dispute turns out to be how and under which framework to reach this goal.
Obviously, the Pirates want to give the population a share to define this aim. Other parties, however, often leave this, figuratively spoken with Adam Smith, to the invisible hand of the market.
In my view, the popularity of the Pirates is based on the feeling expressed by a growing number of people that this invisible hand prevents them from participating in the common wealth. But this relates to the participation in the achievements generated by the whole society rather than to defining the welfare itself. Hence, it is for example comprehensible, why the Pirates demand for an Unconditional Basic Income: to enable an almost bureaucratic-free economic participation for all.
However, only a minority is interested in the wealth of Leviathan. The majority is rather engaged in dealing with their own well-being. As long as Leviathan does not prevent them from doing so, the wealth of this only abstractly imagined being is indifferent for them. Eventually they elected, in a representative democracy, deputies who should care about Leviathan.
The new clothes, designed by the Pirates, are not really an attempted fraud. Further they are an offer for the cleverest in the state to participate in finding solutions for existing problems. As long as the new relation web of the Pirates has no negative impact on the decision making process, it could help to cure Leviathan.
