Taiwan has seen its first series of referendums since the significant liberalization of its referendum law early this year. The results could have implications for the basic income movement in Taiwan and possibly the Asia Pacific.
There has been discussion among Taiwan’s basic income activists to organize Asia’s first basic income referendum on the island.
In January, the new referendum law came into effect in Taiwan, lowering the threshold for the number of signatures required to get a referendum on the ballot. The law also decreased the voting participation requirement from 50 percent to 25 percent.
Such a change made it realistic for a basic income referendum to make it to the ballot in Taiwan.
During the election last weekend, seven of the ten referendums were passed, the first such national referendums to pass in Taiwan’s history. Long lines waited for hours to vote, as many carefully studied the referendum language.
Most notably, opponents of gay marriage successfully passed three anti-LGBT referendums (two pro-LGBT referendums failed to pass), putting Taiwan’s legislature in a precarious position since its top court mandated that same-sex marriage must be legally recognized by May 2019.
How the referendum results will affect legislative action is unclear, since there is no precedent for legislating referendum results in Taiwan. Additionally, the referendum law does not create clear enforcement mechanisms to compel the legislature to act (except in the case of abolishing laws, which must take place within three days of the referendum result).
Regardless of how legally binding the results actually are, Taiwan’s legislature will feel pressure from the popular results to follow the principles of the referendums.
If Taiwan’s government fails to put the referendum results into law, it could have a chilling effect on future referendum movements and create questions about Taiwan’s democracy. There have already been signals from Taiwan’s presidential office that approved referendums regarding nuclear and coal will not lead to a change in energy strategy.
On the other hand, a robust response from the legislature will mobilize activists to utilize referendums as a key legislative strategy. It is likely that 2020 will see a wave of even more referendums than this year.
If some an income guarantee referendum were to pass, Taiwan’s government would only be compelled to submit a proposal and discuss the policy. There would have to be a significant societal mandate from the referendum to ensure the legislature will act to pass a law.
Polling from Academia Sinica and UBI Taiwan find 40 percent to 47 percent respectively of Taiwanese support basic income. As was seen with the competing gay rights referendums, using referendum as a vehicle to advance basic income can also mobilize opposition groups.
The LGBT referendums invited a wave of international attention. Certainly, a basic income referendum would attract regional and international attention as well.
However, a premature basic income referendum without institutional support and lacking a broad activist movement to defend the idea poses substantial risks. Basic income is still a new idea in Taiwan and Asia in general, and misunderstandings could derail the idea before it has an opportunity to develop in the region.
Anti-LGBT groups outspent the pro-LGBT movement and used misinformation and scare tactics to successfully persuade a large portion of Taiwan that LGBT marriage threatened the next generation of families.
It is without question that a basic income referendum would invite backlash from invested groups, who would probably have more financial resources than the nascent basic income movement in Taiwan.
Would an overwhelming vote in opposition to basic income do more harm than good for the movement in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific?
Certainly, Switzerland’s referendum was incredibly successful in propeling discussion of the idea around the world, even though it failed at the ballot box. However, both civic society and basic income activism are far more mature in Europe than in Taiwan.
A rejected basic income referendum in Taiwan could be portrayed as yet another global failure for UBI, along with the cancelled experiment in Canada, the ending of the Finland pilot, and even the rejection of the original Swiss referendum.
If I had to wager, I would bet that the societal discussion over basic income generated from a Taiwanese referendum will be overall helpful to advancing the movement in the Asia Pacific even if it does fail. This is especially true since backlash from opposition groups is inevitable anyway.
It is essential, though, that the basic income movement in Taiwan and beyond carefully consider its strategy to make UBI a reality.
The Midterm elections in the United States were extremely interesting. There was
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a huge Blue Wave of people coming out to vote against Trump’s party, but unlike most midterm elections, there was also a Counter-Wave of enthusiastic Republicans coming out to support Trump’s party (not to mention strategic voter disenfranchisement and Gerrymandering). The Wave and Counter-Wave made for record-high voter turnout, and the Red Counter-Wave did a great job of preventing a disaster and even gaining seats in the Senate, but the Senate was mostly the result of an extremely favorable mix of what states happened to have seats up for election.
The Blue Wave simply won more votes, enough to overcome the Counter-Wave by about 7% in the House, the only nationwide vote. That’s an amazing result for the opposition party in a midterm year with a great economy. It hasn’t happened since 1966 when Vietnam was heating up and the Democrats had just passed Civil Rights legislation losing a vast majority of the people who were actually allowed to vote in the South.
It would be interesting to see estimates of how many races the Democrats would have won without Trump’s Counter-Wave–if Republican turnout had been more consistent with typical in-party midterm election turnout.
With the President, Senate, and Supreme Court functioning as a Republican block, the election won’t make a huge difference in power right now, but it looks bad for Republicans in the future. Although Trump’s taken over the Republican Party, he has done nothing to increase the size of its coalition. If anything, he’s shrunk it, only making up for that by increasing enthusiasm among his coalition.
To win in 2020, he needs the nearly exact same thing to happen as 2016. A big enthusiasm gap in the right places so he can squeak out an electoral college win in pretty much the same states again.
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Trump and the Republicans tenuous hold on a great deal of power rests on his ability to command disproportionate enthusiasm among a minority of voters and on the party’s ability to use voter disenfranchisement and Gerrymandering to translate those votes into election victories.
It seems far more likely that Democratic numbers and enthusiasm will continue to grow, and there will be a big change in 2020.
Will this create an opening for more progressive policies like Basic Income? I’ll discuss that in my next post.
It’s the start of a new month. You wake up in the morning feeling a rush of energy. The air is thick with a positive warmth. You’re immediately motivated and inspired with a thought that is, as if, circulating around everybody’s mind:
“How can I best contribute myself to society today?”
You immediately do what you need to do: go to the bathroom, put your clothes on, get something to eat, and check your bank account. You see your monthly basic income allowance came in. You get through all these necessities as quickly as possible because you want to start connecting to the means where you draw this positive energy.
That means is a social network.
It is unlike the social networks we use today. Ad-free. Conflict-free.
Let’s take this example into consideration. Suppose you stumble into this blog called Motivation District (click for more here) through mutual recommendations. You can see healthy discussions happening there. Maybe the topics discussed over there might relate to your present circumstances, or there are some topics where you would want to freely express your opinion forward. This is a form of social networking where you happen to converse with strangers, discuss opinions, gain insights from them, and many more. Again, there are no conflicts or ads. Differences of opinion can occur, but that’s how a healthy conversation blossoms.
It is a social network thriving with friendliness and enthusiasm. Everyone feels equally important and responsible for creating it. Everybody actively expresses their opinion in discussions with no fear of judgment, criticism or argument. Everybody listens to everybody and does not simply interject with their opinions. It’s not the same with social media platforms. Be it business or personal accounts, networking on social media has become a daily pattern. They are of course, accountable for what they post. Businesses are therefore very wary of cyber-attacks through social media, as a breach in users’ accounts can cost them quite a lot of money. When you check the stages of a cyberattack
, you can see that social media is one of the initial targets in resource collection.
Networking has different patterns in the real world, sometimes it is about contributing or acquiring the reward. In exchange for the basic income allowance that entered your bank account a little earlier, you need to answer a few questions in this network. As soon as you see the first question, you understand why you had that thought earlier. The question is:
“How can I best contribute myself to society today?”
You click “Agree” on the network’s conditions, which state a few guidelines that all participants need to follow in this network. They ultimately boil down to one main condition: Leave your ego outside.
You agree to everyone being equally important; everyone actively answering the questions (which are made with everyone’s ability to answer them in mind); no arguing with, criticizing or judging others; focusing on the topic at hand, i.e. not veering it into unrelated directions; and listening to others speak as if it is you who is speaking.
These conditions are founded on a synergic principle where humans and nature are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. They aim at guiding us so that we don’t fall victim to our involuntary, egoistic impulses when we participate in creating a well-connected social atmosphere.
You connect to a video conference with a few other people, and you each state your answers to the questions. In addition to the first question-“How can I best contribute myself to society today?”-there are a couple more:
“What is one positive example that inspired me yesterday of someone contributing to society?”
“How can we help each other not fall victim to our automatic egoistic impulses that make us want to criticize, judge and harm others, and support each other in the construction of a positively connected atmosphere above our self-centeredness?”
Halfway into the discussion, you feel a new wave of energy stream through you. It is an energy latent in nature, which becomes revealed when people come together, regardless of their differences, and act, think and desire in a way that is adapted to nature’s integrality. We do not feel this in our current world of relationships.
After finishing the discussion, some people go to work, others stay in the network to participate in other activities, whether they be discussions, lessons or courses either to deepen their knowledge of nature, human development, psychology, or to improve life skills, relationships, parenting, health, personal finance, time management, or participating in support groups for a wide range of interests and life situations. You choose to participate in this network online, but the same activities also take place at local community centers for anyone who wants to participate in a more physical way.
All the activities in the network aim at both supplying what people need, so that they do not have any problems supplying themselves with life’s necessities, and beyond that, improving people’s connections and social skills. You meet new people all the time, and the atmosphere is always enlivening, supportive and constructive.
Nowadays people have more and more social anxiety when it comes to meeting new people so social media seems like the right place to help these people to make new friends without the nervousness of messing up in person. However, social occasions will always occur and therefore, many people with social anxiety will take cannabis products like delta-8. They know what to expect with delta-8 THC such as things like an increase in sociability and relaxation, however, for now keeping things mainly online helps to develop these connections before the meeting up in person has to occur.
The tendency to support, benefit and connect with other people above our egoistic drives, is continually encouraged in this network. Likewise, values we currently hold become viewed from a new, unified vantage point. For example, competition in this network is based not on money, but on how much we can help and serve others.
Success in this network is not seen as building a personal empire despite, and on account of, other people. Instead, success is seen as a social construct, that we succeed together as a society, by connecting above our egoistic, divisive drives. By doing so, we get positive feedback from nature, a new surge of energy and motivation, by aligning ourselves with nature’s constant unifying motion.
This is how I envision a correctly functioning universal basic income. That is, UBI cannot work on its own. Simply giving people allowances without any incentives to succeed would stagnate society. In order for UBI to work, it needs to be provided in exchange for prosocial, connection-enriching participation, learning and development. People need tools, education, and encouragement to build a positively-functioning society in exchange for basic income. The idea of the “prosocial network” above is one direction the connection-enriching educational programs could take.
A Much Deeper and Wider Source of Motivation
In today’s capitalistic economy, people contribute to society with money as a leading motivator. Other drives, like respect, honor, fame, control, and knowledge are interwoven with money. That is, there is a price tag attached to every kind of social contribution.
However, considering a future where automation and robots will be given much of the workload, and where people get basic income allowances regardless of any work, we’re left to ponder serious questions:
What would people want to contribute to that society?
Why would they want to contribute to that society?
This is where the concept of universal basic income enters to support and propel the value shift necessary not only for UBI to work in the long term, but also for the foundation of a prosperous, connected society of happy and confident individuals, each motivated to contribute to the creation of a new thriving culture.
Michael Laitman
A prosocial resurgence combined with UBI has the power to make a significant gear shift in society. In order for that to happen, human relations, usually viewed as a byproduct of people’s professions and education, now need to be placed at the center of our attention. The motivation to contribute to society would need to change, from a monetary motivation to a purely prosocial, pro-connective motivation: one where we would regularly vitalize each other with examples of how we rise above our egoistic tendencies, thinking about, connecting to and benefiting other members of society. This would serve as a source of constant motivation, encouragement and ultimately, pave the way to a society of united, happy and confident individuals.
Today, there are thousands of people worldwide from all walks of life who feel the importance of jumpstarting the connection-enriching process in society, pioneering it even before the widespread launch of basic income. They are already engaged in learning, implementing and experimenting with the principle of positive connection above differences as the most valuable means to improve human society.
Anyone who is attracted to this idea of bettering the world by bettering human relations, and who wishes to participate in the learning and creation of a new prosocial, pro-connective culture, is welcome to learn its fundamental principles and basic concepts.
Michael Laitman is a Professor of Ontology, a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah, an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and was the prime disciple of Kabbalist, Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag (the RABASH). He has written over 40 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages.
Al Jazeera invited me to participate in a panel discussion (on of all things) U.S. foreign policy. It didn’t give me the chance to talk about basic income or about “indepentarianism” specifically, but I think I made some good points. I said the campaign donors aren’t trying to get candidates elected, but to buy influence. I wish I’d said that this fact makes campaign contributions a form of legalized bribery. I said that when Trump says “America First,” he really means “Me First,” and that most of his foreign policy is to find some leader he can bully to make himself look like a tough guy. I wished I’d said that like he strokes White American’s egos, but delivers for himself not for them—much like most nationalist leaders around the world today and throughout history. I said that America is still acting like it’s 1945 when America was the only in-tact industrial economy. It’s overplaying its influence trying to impose unilateral sanctions on Iran and other places, and overplaying its hand like this will ultimately weaken not strengthen American influence in the world.
Next time I hope they put me on a panel where I can bring up basic income.
Tribal groups, in which all men and women on Earth have lived since humanity emerged, have functioned through cooperation and solidarity among their members in tasks such as obtaining and distributing food, building shelters, and family dwellings or taking care of community assets; tasks that today we would call ‘economic’. In fact, over hundreds of thousands of years of human presence on Earth the whole economy was cooperative and supportive. And at the time it was sustainable. About 6,000 years ago things began to change when the first sophisticated civilizations arose and put into practice a variety of new forms of economic organization; from the range of traditional systems based on agriculture or trade to, subsequently, feudalism, mercantilism and everything else after that. Today, however, all the economic diversity that existed over those 6,000 years is virtually nullified, and an (almost) unique model has once again consolidated. It is called capitalism, and it has been going on for about 200 years.
Ancestral economies were based on solidarity and cooperation among people, on a harmony between them and nature and on an orientation towards the mere satisfaction of their needs. Capitalism is characterized by competition among peers, by the predation of the Earth and by an orientation of its agents aiming at unlimited material accumulation. Both modes are hegemonic, each in its own time, but that is about as much as these modes have in common.
Can, like its ancestral homologous form, the present ‘state of the art’ in economic organization – capitalism – last for hundreds of thousands of years? It does not seem possible, given the condition in which it left the planet and humans, after only 200 years. Earth’s soils, rivers, oceans, and atmosphere are now filled with the poisons left over from our economic activity; the climate is changing, the elements unsettled and life as we know it may be doomed, if we do not make deep and rapid changes. As for us humans, materialistic as we have become, we too often forget who we really are and can do: our nature as creators; our ability to generate art, mathematics or philosophy; our potential for freedom, for choosing paths, for changing ourselves and the world as we decide, and the lack of any natural bound between us and what we can achieve or be. By forgetting so much, we reduce ourselves to economic roles, going now so far as to even discuss whether artificial intelligence and robots will make us pointless and expendable one day. The culprit is our current economic culture and system.
However, despite its pitfalls, an important merit can be attributed to capitalism: with the demand for accumulation and profit, it has given us machinery, techniques, and knowledge that can now allow us to access the resources necessary for the material comfort of all. This is only a possibility though since these machines, techniques, and knowledge only provide the capacity, not the guarantee of its use.
Our collective future is unforeseeable. It will be the result of an infinity of both conscious choices and involuntary actions, taken by billions of individuals and groups, in a chaotic general movement that no one can control or anticipate. And yet, it can be felt that capitalism would make no sense in human history unless it was fated to eventually free us from the shackles of material scarcity. Hence, the great economic question of our time must be: how to accomplish the potential that capitalism offers us? The simple ‘progress’, as currently evolving, does not seem to be the way. Reality shows us, everywhere, that the mere growth of the present economy, without any change or innovation in its logic and processes, will never free us. Neither will the strengthening of the so-called welfare state, in its traditional, bureaucratic, expensive and life-controlling form. It can do no more than mitigate poverty, but at a high cost in dignity to its beneficiaries, and a cost in humanity to all the others. The more unnecessary this becomes the more intolerable it gets.
Each one of us, rich or poor, directly or indirectly is suffering from the lack of a process which guarantees the essentials for all. Clearly, this is no longer a problem of production capacity, but one of economic organization. The satisfaction of the basic needs of all people is not inherent to capitalism, nor has it ever been added to it. However, without such process, we will not rid ourselves from the specter of material poverty, and therefore from this never-enough culture in which we find ourselves in. Mainly reduced to producers and consumers, we are exhausting the energy that could alternatively be spent in higher occupations which our potential allows and claims for us.
And yet, we can immediately introduce such process of guaranteeing the essentials for all: let us recover from our ancestral economic way its core element of solidarity among people.
A Future – the UBI-AA
Solidarity among people is the essential idea behind the alternative resource distribution model here described: the Unconditional Basic Income of All for All, or ‘UBI-AA’.
UBI-AA is a revenue redistribution process, generically designed to operate monthly, providing automatic and unconditional transfers among citizens, from those who have higher incomes to those with lower or no income at all. Built, supported and leveraged by them alone, the process will invite participants to take responsibility and engage in their communities, which will reinforce these.
It works in two stages:
1) As it is acquired, each member of the community discounts to a common fund – a ‘UBI Fund’ – a proportion of their income, at a single and universal rate;
2) At the end of each month, the Fund’s accumulated total is equally and unconditionally distributed among all members of the same community.
This simple process, which demands the same effort from all participants while offering them the same benefit, treats everyone equally. It turns those who, at each moment in time, have above-average incomes into net payers to the UBI Fund, and those who have below-average incomes into net receivers. Thus, the process operates a joint distribution among participants of part of their individual incomes. In addition to reducing inequalities, this solidarity among peers creates an unconditional guarantee of income for all, that is, an Unconditional Basic Income.
It follows from the UBI-AA process that the loss of available income by some will be the gain of others. Importantly, for the scheme to be accepted by the former and really useful to the latter, the losses involved should be moderate and the gains significant. This should not, however, lead to a devaluation in the possibilities of the mutability of all individual positions. As time goes by and while exercising the options which the process itself opens to participants, individual situations of income ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ should always be seen as circumstantial.
To achieve its intended effects, the implementation of the UBI-AA should be accompanied by the release of its participants from the burden of personal income tax. Such tax relief will compensate them for the contributory effort required by the UBI-AA process. However, for those above a certain level of income, such compensation may turn out to be merely partial.
Once the personal income tax is abolished, the moderation of losses for citizens with above-average incomes and, simultaneously, the material significance of gains to those with under-average incomes, will be possible if the rate of contributions to the UBI Fund is set at an optimal level, balancing the two outcomes.
A more complete description of the UBI-AA process, as well as a simulation of the financial effects it would have produced, both in individual citizen spheres and in the State budget, hypothesizing it in force in Portugal in 2012, can be reached here.
UBI-AA differs from most current traditional redistributive processes because it is unconditional. It also differs from most unconditional alternative processes since it is a construct of common citizens, instead of a government, a central bank or any other ‘power’ policy. We see it as a humane alternative to organizing the economy on its distributive side. Operating through the income distribution process described above, it will favor the rehabilitation of values such as solidarity and voluntary cooperation among people, and the creation of an unconditional guarantee of income for all will be a corollary.
We cherish the hope that this may contribute to the flourishing of a new and less materialistic culture. Who knows, if making everybody’s access to essential material resources as simple as breathing, will not end up instilling in people the same attitude towards those resources – money and the things it buys – as the one we have towards the air we breathe: no matter how valuable it may be to us, we do not quarrel with each other for it; we only use it in the quantities we need; accumulating it does not even occur to us. Such a cultural shift would certainly be a great human civilizational progress and a much-needed step towards a reconciliation between us and our environment.
(coauthored by Grant McCall, Tulane University and the Center for Human-Environmental Research) The paper addresses the natural-rights-based (“right-libertarian” or more descriptively “propertarian”) justification of private property to show that it is not a purely normative argument. The paper argues that propertarian principles cannot rule out government or collective ownership of territory on a purely normative, a priori basis, and therefore, cannot rule out the government’s right to tax, regulate, or redistribute property titles without relying on empirical historical claims. Therefore, the natural-rights-based justification of extensive ethical limits on those powers has to stand on the empirical claim that such an event, though possible, is historically implausible—a claim or a collection of claims we call “the classically liberal hypothesis.”
This hypothesis could be specified in at least three different ways. First, before governments or any other collective institutions appear, all or most resources are appropriated by individuals acting as individuals to established private property rights. Second, only individuals acting as individuals perform appropriative acts (i.e. neither individuals acting as monarchs nor groups intending to establish collective, public, or government-held property rights perform appropriative acts). Third, even if collectives perform appropriative acts, subsequent transfers of titles (in the absence of rights violations) are likely only to produce privatized property rights.
This chapter sets up the next two. Chapter 3 examines the evidence propertarians have put forward to support the classically liberal hypothesis, showing that this evidence is extremely weak. Chapter 4 investigates the truth-value of the hypothesis. It not only gives a strong argument for the falsity of the hypothesis; it presents strong evidence indicating that quite the opposite is true. Individualistic private property rights—largely or entirely free of collective control—tend only to be established through aggressive rights violations.
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” The Prehistory of Private Property, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2019.
NOTE to Basic Income supporters: although this paper and this book are not directly about Basic Income, they address an argument commonly used to oppose Basic Income.
