Charity is for setbacks, not systematic shortfalls

by Guest Contributor | Oct 26, 2015 | Opinion

Image via Intermountain CFC.

by Karen Christine Patrick

We have refugees in my house this week, one is a dog we are dog-sitting for our friend who had a sudden death in the family. The other is an elderly neighbor who had three trees come down in his yard from a sudden storm as we get from time-to-time here in Texas. Friends and neighbors are likely to assist in the case of our elderly friend beyond putting him up for a few days. On a fixed income, he’s going to have a hard time with the bill for the electrician to repair his power box that was torn from the house. We are working on this issue, but this situation but this had me thinking about “charity” in terms of short term or how it’s seen as a crutch for the economy, the safety net when all others fail.

Where I live, we hear about “faith based charities” like it’s a panacea for the increasing austerity and appealing to the noble notion that giving is good (which it is) and communities ought to support the needy. Key word here is “ought”… in other words, it’s voluntary and so people may or may not respond, fair enough. Also, people cannot be guilted into giving what they don’t have. That’s not fair, although some of the most generous people I know give sacrificially, and that is admirable. But as we go now in the “recession” LONGER than the Great Depression, and people are burning every resource they have now just for the basics, depending on charity is not realistic for an economy that doesn’t allow for the accumulation of resources to be shared in the first place, generally.

Charities can help people, but they need to be helped first before they can do that. With the economy down, most of the charities are very limited like never before. I think that giving to others is a wonderful thing, but it is important to acknowledge that charity can’t make up for when an economic system is being mismanaged on the grand scale. Experiencing a move, I came from a community with much stronger charitable capacity than the one I am in now. I have seen that charitable capacity differs, community by community, according to the overall health of the local economy.

Charity is great, but it’s for setbacks. It does it’s best work providing for life’s unfortunate events, for the ability for the community to respond individually and collectively to what wasn’t able to be provided any other way. However, more and more it’s apparent that our system is broken at the top. Financial scandals and bank bailouts by the government means something is really, really wrong with the monetary system itself that needs corrected or the bailouts and “easing” won’t do a darn thing. The people will lose trust enough, hopefully before “a crash” as our grandfathers and grandmothers told us about.

Charity was not made to balance an imbalance in the social contract where we expect the wealthy to contribute, not continually hunt for loopholes and tax shelters. That doesn’t mean they don’t contribute at all, for there are many foundations and charitable organizations that court the wealthy to contribute. There is that tax benefit thing also further goading the wealthy to cough up the cash. Great. Awesome. More. However, by the numbers, we see a gross inequity where charity is just a cover up of a fundamentally unfair system of patronage, not unlike the feudal age. That is not just rhetoric on my part, we have a world where eighty individuals now have over half the wealth of the planet. That is mind boggling. And the laws, governments, economic advantages have the effect of an invisible funnel pumping money up the chain. The idea of a “trickle down” is a joke. The experiment is over and the results are in. What do we hear from our politicians? Austerity. Not just in Europe but American Austerity. Our leaders are whipping the donkey that knows it’s about to go over a fiscal cliff.

Yet Americans are very generous, to a fault. And the fault often is they get their heartstrings pulled to donate to charities who say they are taking care of people in need. However, people need to get some awareness about the world of the non-profits. Not all are managed well. I have done quite a bit of volunteer work and unfortunately have seen the dark side of charity. One important thing people should do is investigate the charities they give to. An important consideration is to see how much “pennies on the dollar” or by percentage, how much fundage goes to the client population, the people on the posters. One way to check is with the office of your state’s Attorney General department. They have information of how much is being donated and how much goes to the needy.

Fortunately, this is not the norm, but one horror story I can share illustrates where some can take advantage. I volunteered for an organization where the director was an alcoholic and regularly asked for donations of wine for fundraising events but always requested an overage and then CHARGED for glasses of wine at the event, thereby assuring that there was extra left over, that she took home for herself and gave to friends. Yikes! But it happens. The usual situation is that most charities are underfunded and overwhelmed. Mistakes and misunderstandings, stress and strain is common, burnout common and organizational strain complying to the ever-increasing demands of a state that would rather lean on charities instead of managing the economy properly and fairly.

The truth is, nobody really wants to be on the receiving end of charity if they can help it. It’s humiliating for most people. I’ve used those services myself, especially when I had kids, just to survive. Also, I have walked others through the process of getting help, from getting food stamps , applying for disability benefits, taking them to the food or clothing bank for the first time. It’s not a fun situation, in the case of the food banks, I have had to help people with special dietary needs and so they are limited in what is there to take home because instead of being able to choose what they need from a store, they have to pick through what was donated and hope for the best. Ditto those going to a clothing bank. Hope it fits! Doesn’t smell funny. I have to give kudos to the wonderful organizations that get this “right” and work really hard at it.

But here is the situation, minimum wage and part-time workers are the working poor. They are working, but they are not making enough to make it. They require support EVERY month and now many have done this for years, decades, generations. Month after month, if you go into a store in a moderate to poor neighborhood and right around the first of the month, you will see what are the cheap eats because those with food stamps will have emptied those sections and there will be rectangular holes on the store shelves where the bargains were cleaned out. This is not about how people are trying to survive, but how we have an economic system that has been systemically weak for a very long time.

There are whole levels of our economy, organizations, and corporations that benefit by there being a poverty class. For example, banks by being the issuers of food cards are getting a kickback on each transaction. Almost all states could make the choice to create their own banks for dealing with state benefit programs like North Dakota has and thereby save money for the state government, but do not. Organizations and individuals that BENEFIT from there being a poor class are not likely to want to change the situation. If we have an industry that benefits from poverty, how are we going to get rid of poverty? I would love it if every person who works for an organization or BANK or business that works for charities would work themselves out of their job because suddenly everybody is doing so well, unless it’s the kind of charity for emergencies and setbacks only.

One proposal for abolishing poverty is the Basic Income Guarantee, giving a cash grant to every citizen just like we do with Social Security benefits. Those who benefit from poverty would find themselves out of work. But hey, they still would have a Basic Income Guarantee to live on when they no longer are needed for that kind of work. If you are employed because of poverty, you would want to work yourself out of a job, right? Am I right?

If people still want to help, I think it’s wonderful that the B.I.G. is going to unleash a wave of volunteerism like never before. I believe in the philosophy that humans will “get up and do stuff” and freed from drudgery jobs by automation and robotics, supported financially to get the gas to get in the car to go to where one volunteers will mean more people will have the time and ability to volunteer. We will re-define charity in terms of hands-on help instead of dollars and cents.

For more from Karen Christine Patrick, visit her blog.

Short Answers to BIG FAQs (Part 3 of 3)

by Timothy Roscoe Carter | Oct 19, 2015 | Opinion

[The following is an excerpt from a book in progress, The Poverty Abolitionist’s Handbook.]

Q: Basic income seems like such a fringe idea. I do not want to waste my time on something that is not going to happen. Is a basic income politically feasible?

Image via FMDam.org.

A: In the U.S. Presidential campaign of 1972, both incumbent Republican Richard Nixon and Democratic challenger George McGovern included versions of a basic income in their campaign platforms. In 1988, two men in Indiana sued for a license to marry each other, and the judge not only threw out the case, but also levied a fine of $2,800 on the men for wasting the court’s time with a frivolous lawsuit. The judge wrote that the plaintiffs’ “claims about Indiana law and constitutional rights are wacky and sanctionably so.”(1) Today, it may seem like basic income could never be taken seriously by mainstream politicians and it is hard to remember just how much of lunatic fringe idea same-sex marriage was one generation ago. But with all of human history against it, activists moved the zeitgeist in favor of same-sex marriage in just one generation. With hard work, poverty abolitionists should be able to advance public opinion back to where it was in 1972.
And we are making progress. In 2014, the idea of basic income received more media attention and support from political leaders around the world than at anytime in the past 30 years. And as the slowly growing crisis of technological unemployment demands attention from political leaders, basic income will be discussed more and more openly as the only practical solution.
Do I really believe there is a reasonable chance of a basic income being adopted in the United States in the next five years? Sadly, no. But with hard work, adoption in the United States in 20 years is certainty feasible. And even if it takes 50 years to abolish poverty, would not that be worth it?

(1)Arthur Leonard, Judge Denies Marriage License to Gay Male Prisoners, 1988 Lesbian/Gay L. Notes 63.

Q: Would children get the basic income?
A: Why not?
Actually, there are a lot of different opinions on this. Some say yes, some say no, some think children should get a smaller basic income, and some think children should get a full basic income but all or a portion of it should be held in trust until they are adults. Some jurisdictions actually provide small basic incomes, or nearly basic incomes to children even though they do not provide them to adults, through baby bonds and child tax credits. The most common reason given for saying that children should be denied the same basic income given to adults is that it will encourage poor people to have children who will be dependent on the state, but there is little support for this. Adults with a basic income will not be poor, and birth rates decline as incomes rise. For someone not already in poverty, it is unlikely the basic income will be large enough to make having a child a financially smart move. But whatever you believe about children and a basic income, remember that children are fully human, so any deviation from what adults receive needs to convincingly answer the question, “Why not?”

Q: Would people in NewYork City get the same basic income as people in Oakley, Kansas?
A: The truth is we do not know whether or not “top ups” would be needed in more expensive areas if there was a basic income. Currently, most people are forced to live in cities because that is where the jobs are, and rents are high in cities because the property owners can extort money from people who have to live there because they need to live near their work, and retail prices are high in cities because rents are high. What would population patterns be like if people could just move to rural areas and live off of a basic income if rents got too high? Would rents go down in cities if people were not forced to live where jobs are? We simply do know the answer to those questions. So it would be best to start with a basic income that is universal, unconditional, and uniform at the national level, and be willing to revisit the idea of top ups for more expensive areas when we know what life with a basic income is like. Meanwhile, local governments can offer smaller basic incomes to their residents financed from local taxes and resources to add to a national basic income. A national basic income should not force Alaska to stop paying dividends to its residents from its oil revenues nor American Indian tribes from paying its members dividends from casinos, for example, nor any other local government from offering refundable tax credits.

Q: Would visitors to the country, whether documented or not, be entitled to the basic income?
A: The short answer is “no”. I know of no well-sussed basic income proposal that contemplates sending payments to anyone beyond citizens and legal permanent residents (LPRs), and as a practical matter, it would seem unlikely that any proposal to make payments to anyone beyond LPRs would pass. Indeed, many basic income supporters prefer the terms “Citizen’s Income” or “Citizen’s Dividend”.
However, after a basic income is established for citizens and LPRs, it may be worthwhile to revisit whether other visitors can get a basic income as a separate societal decision. Unlike for children, the burden would be on those who want to extend benefits to visitors, and there are good reasons to extend the basic income beyond LPRs, and good reasons not to extend the basic income beyond LPRs.

Q: What are some good reasons to extend a basic income beyond legal permanent residents (LPRs)?
A: Some possibilities:
* Any humane society will provide at least some social benefits to the poor within their borders, however they got there, and cash payments might simply be more efficient.
* Poorer immigrants either spend their incomes or send a portion to poor relatives back home, so cash payments to them will either stimulate our economy or act as foreign assistance well targeted to the needy in nations with intimate ties to ours.
* Immigrant workers who do not receive a basic income are more easily exploited as cheap labor and would be unfair competition for citizens and LPRs who do receive a basic income.

Q: What are some good reasons not to extend the basic income beyond citizens and legal permanent residents (LPRs)?
A: Some possibilities:
* The basic income could be a magnet drawing an unsustainable number of immigrants. It would be easy to be overly skeptical of this concern, because anti-immigrant voices have been claiming for decades that immigrants come here for welfare benefits, and that is simply not true. Immigration tends to rise and fall with jobs, not availability of welfare benefits. However, the general utility of cash benefits may make them so qualitatively different from welfare benefits that people might start coming here just to receive them.
* Granting cash benefits to other poor visitors might interfere with the alternate humane policy of trying to extend LPR status to as many of them as possible, reducing both the pressure on other immigrants to become LPRs, and the pressure on politicians to extend LPR status to far greater numbers of people.
* Rather than extend the basic income beyond citizens and LPRs via unilateral legislation, we might choose to do so via reciprocal treaties, encouraging other nations to establish a basic income and/or leading the establishment of a global basic income.

Q: How can you possibly think it is moral for some people to live off of the work of others?
A: What I find immoral is *forcing* some people to work for the benefit of others. That is why I support a basic income guarantee. It was Vladimir Lenin in Bolshevik Russia who stated, “Those who don’t work don’t eat.” Whether that sentiment is expressed by Lenin or by Charles and David Koch in 21st century America, it is powerful members of society demanding that the government use its guns to enforce a Utopian ideology that benefits them personally on the masses that did not consent. If everyone had a basic income, then no one would be forced to work for others. With a basic income, producers would have to be induced to work voluntarily, either by appealing to their good nature or by offering them special benefits such as recognition or extra money.

Q: If everyone received a basic income, would not employers simply reduce salaries by the amount of the basic income, since their employees would need that much less money to live on?
A: Wage substitution from a basic income should only occurs at the lowest subsistence level wages. Because no one will work for less than they need to live, supply drops off at that point. Giving those people other regular income that is not sufficient to live off of reduces what they need to live from employers. This is why a minimum wage will still be necessary until we have a basic income that is higher than what people need to live. However, a wage substitution effect should not occur once there is a basic income above subsistence level, since recipients would be empowered to leave jobs where they did not believe they were being paid adequately.
There should be no wage substitution effect on skilled labor. Everyone making over subsistence level is getting paid based on the supply of and demand for their specific skills. There are plenty of people willing to do the work of a nurse for much less than nurses make, but they cannot because they do not have the skills. At subsistence level, the “supply” in the supply and demand labor curve is the supply of bodies. Above subsistence, the “supply” is the supply of skills. A UBI at less than subsistence level can allow bodies to supplied for less, but no basic income will directly change the supply of skills.

Q: Do we currently have any empirical evidence of what the effect of a basic income would be on wages at the macro level?
A: No. The Alaska Permanent Fund and the Earned Income Tax Credit do not appear to have affected wages either positively or negatively, while the Speenhamland System in England in the early 19th Century does appear to have generated a wage substitution effect. However, none of these cases is illustrative. The amount of Alaska Permanent Fund payments is too variable for employees to count on what they might receive, and it pays people in a state where the supply of even unskilled labor is consistently tight. The Earned Income Tax Credit is means tested, applies primarily to workers with children, and is too complicated for most of its recipients to understand for them to rely on it. The Speenhamland System was an extremely heavily means-tested income support program conditional on work. No basic income experiments have been conducted at a massive enough scale to see effects on labor markets.

Basic Income as the Core of the Economy

by Guest Contributor | Oct 12, 2015 | Opinion

by George Spilkov

Outline of a framework for Basic Income at the core of an economic model based on free market economy

Adam Smith predicated his vision for a free market economy on the understanding that some constraints must be set in place to ensure all members of the society are self-sufficient and also, that they exchange only the surplus produce of their labour. He even went as far as to insist on division of labour being “designed” depending on the size of the market.

“When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all the surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for” – Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”, Ch.3

But then Karl Marx (“The Capital”) convincingly explained that the condition for self-sufficiency cannot be satisfied, because workers have lost the means of production and are no longer self-sufficient. They depend for their survival on specialized division of labour that is imposed on them.

Is that the end of Adam Smith’s free-market or could such ideas be saved by the introduction of Basic Income? I believe the answer is “Yes, Basic Income can be the solution” and for the rest of this text I’ll try to explain why and how.

What is a human being to a business? For many businesses a human being is perceived as ‘a consumer’ at the output end of the businesses and as ‘a worker’ at the input end of the businesses. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the businesses to charge the humans as much as possible when they are consumers while paying them as little as possible when they are workers. The end result of such duality is, the humans suffer, businesses make profit; wealth concentrates, the people lose completely their self-sufficiency. Even now, we are making great strides in Intelligent Automation that, thankfully, is still managing to make good use of human talent, but for how long can this go on?

The matter can get much worse for the humans. Let’s just imagine a near future world (say about 50 generations from now) where automation has advanced to levels that resemble human-like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In such world, workers will no longer exist in any meaningful sense, because nearly all work will be done by a super intelligent automation. The businesses will perceive most human beings only as consumers. In such future, most humans will be jobless and, majority of us will have no means of production that can make us self-sufficient.

In our current society, humans without jobs (or income) become consumers without money. Consumers without money are useless to the businesses thus can be “discarded” (it means, literally wiped out of existence). How are we going to survive then? Perhaps, some of us could survive by reverting to violent redistribution of wealth (like war for example). Such approach creates too much suffering. The correct answer is we survive together, as one species, by introducing Basic Income. It must be sufficient to ensure the existence of a wide base of consumers who, in turn, will ensure the prosperity of the businesses and the society.

Do we need to wait for a future that has a human-like AGI before we consider Basic Income? Can we introduce it today and achieve great prosperity now? I believe the answers is, “Yes, we can have Basic income today” and we can have it in a way that is independent of political or technological circumstances i.e. a way applicable to any historical period. Let’s see how it can be done.

Who decides what a ‘dignified’ living is? Perhaps, a bunch of people, called a government, makes the decision while driven by their own ideas about what is ‘basic’ and ‘dignified’? Governments change, therefore, if the amount of Basic Income is determined by some political process (e.g. government’s budget justified by some ideology) then it is likely that Basic Income will turn into another tool to exert control over the people by applying control over the amount of BI.

Much more powerful approach is to implement Basic Income by using the free market as a base for estimating BI. Let’s call it Market Driven Basic Income (MDBI). The meaning of ‘Market Driven’ is that Basic Income will be an opposing market force to the leverage businesses (and other man-made constructs) obtain over the people due to their natural tendency to treat human beings with double standards (e.g. as ‘workers’ and as ‘consumers’).

MDBI can be defined as, the ‘most common’ outgoing spending amongst human individuals when seen as consumers and taxpayers. MDBI has to be derived from metrics that ‘capture’ only transactions from a person to a business, from a person to a government and from a person to any other ‘man-made societal construct’ (i.e. those metrics should reflect only the personal outgoing spending of the human beings, not metrics like gross output or GDI, or CPI, etc.). MDBI is a figure indicated, in part, by the free consumer markets showing what most individuals purchased the most and ,in part, by any other outgoing spending the individuals have (including taxes, fees, etc.).
With MDBI in place they (the businesses, the government, etc.) may even ask payments from us for the air that we breathe, it will make no difference to any of us as long as most of us have to make such payments, because such payments will become ‘common’ therefore “highlighted” to influence the MDBI.

Think about it, the more they (various political and economic man-made constructs in the human society) charge us (the human beings), for the goods and services they try to sell us or impose on us, the more they’ll have to pay us as Basic Income. The less they charge us the less they’ll have to pay us.

Finally, to transform MDBI into Basic Income (BI) some adjustment may need to be made using the formula,
BI=MDBI+DI,
where, DI is a certain amount of Disposable Income. It drives the direction of the economy and determines its minimum speed.

The free market ideas of Libertarianism (laissez faire capitalism) imply that three components must be in place in a free market; a free transaction, a free producer and a free consumer. We must ensure the existence of free consumers before we can talk about true laissez faire free market for human consumers. BI, defined by using MDBI, ensures the existence of free-consumers. On the free market, the freedom of the consumer can truly be measured only by the amount of Disposable Income (DI) a consumer has. The consumer freedom is the disposable income a human being can afford to waste on (or invest in) whatever they like without affecting their normal life (think of DI as gambling money of sort that drive the economy).

Also, the DI adjustment to BI is necessary because the businesses will begin to create a gap between prices of products affecting the MDBI and the next-up version of the same products. Therefore, the amount of DI adjustment should be set to breach about 80% of that gap. If the gap is allowed to exist the economy will stagnate without the DI adjustment.

What is the meaning of the ‘most common’ in the definition of MDBI? I am sure statisticians may have a very good answer to that question. My guess would be, first, apply some good clustering algorithm to determine the categories of people’s outgoing spending and then find out which of these categories are common for, let say, 80% of the people.

Why would people want to work if BI is defined as previously described?
Well, the incentive to work will come from linking the Minimum Wage (MW) to the Basic Income using the following formula,
MW= K * MDBI,
Where, MW = is the minimum wage;
K = is a multiplier to represent the incentive for people to get a job. (For optimal results I recommend K=2)
That makes the total minimum income for a working person equal to =BI+MW =BI+2*MDBI or expressed otherwise = (1+K)*MDBI+DI.

The presented model will outperform in simulations any other model. It will create a vibrant and agile economy generating optimal wealth while allowing dignified existence (defined by the free market) of all members of the society and will encourage people to seek employment. It will provide sufficient income(capital) to the lower end of the wealth ladder that will stimulate attempts for new small enterprises and business ideas.
The proposed model protects the human beings from any economic or political man-made constructs (systems of rules) regardless of the historical period or the technological development.
Market driven Basic Income could be implemented within 1-2 years, because much of the data necessary to determine the MDBI is already available in some form. It is just a matter of interpreting the data for the purposes of BI and also making small adjustments to the existing laws.
In a long term, perhaps, people can declare their outgoing spending by using a ‘spending card’ of sort which logs all outgoing payments (something like ‘electronic receipts and costs logger’).
For the remaining of this text, let’s try to predict some of the expected effects of introducing MDBI and the model’s sensitivity to influences.
What will be the reaction of the government and businesses to the market driven approach to BI?
MDBI avoids government involvement in determining its amount thus making BI independent of political or moral ideologies. It will make the government feel less oppressive to the people.
It is in the government’s best interest to keep the MDBI as low as possible. That means the government will seek to apply high taxes to a small groups of people and entities (i.e the rich) instead of smaller taxes to a wider groups of people (i.e. the poor).
MDBI may incentivize the government to extend the free social services (like free educations, medical care, etc.) in the hope that it will reduce the outgoing spending of the people thus reducing MDBI while allowing the government to be in control and work for the people.
The government will have to adjust its budget policies not to some ideological dogma about what people should or should not do. Its budget policies will have to be directed towards ensuring the funds for Basic Income Guarantee defined by the market preferences of the people and the economic and technological realities of the current, or any other, historical period.
Introducing Minimum wage (MW) linked to the BI will cause the businesses to respond by providing cheap goods that will cover the common needs (so they will pay lower wages), and then there will be a version of the same goods but at a higher price. Such response does not matter to the people, because if the people choose to use their DI for the more expensive goods then those goods will eventually become ‘common’ and therefore will affect the MDBI.
Some businesses will have to restructure their capital into new types of businesses. Those businesses that cannot remain competitive will have to close. Jobs will be lost. However with the newly found spending power many people may decide to start their own businesses. Other businesses will flourish because people will be able to purchase more of their products. That will create jobs.
Many companies, for example, like McDonald’s , will flourish under the new MW and BI. They will have higher labour costs which they will transform into cost per burger. However, the new relative cost per burger will be less compared to the new purchasing power of their customers. People will purchase more burgers and the profit for McDonald’s as absolute value will not change much. Also, their client base may increase if the product they sell is desirable and competitive.
After the introduction of BI the Supply and Demand principle will continue to work but without the leverage the businesses currently have over the human beings.
Finally, let’s look at a hypothetical worst case scenario involving MDBI where businesses actively act, hypothetically, against the idea of linking BI to MW. Let say most businesses decide to close in order to protect their wealth, resources and the means of production that they own and control. That will create massive unemployment and shortage of resources. Most unemployed people may rely only on BI for their survival. If most businesses close it will cause artificially created demand resulting in empty shops and insane prices. Consumers will stop purchasing thus driving BI down. However, people need at least, food, water and shelter. They will be willing to spend their entire BI to cover those needs. If no business is willing to provide those in sufficient quintiles then the government must temporary revoke the sanctity of ownership for the very wealthy. That means, moving wealth down the wealth-ladder to those who are willing to provide products on the market to cover at least the basic human needs for sustenance and shelter. That will restart the economy.
Such hypothetical scenario is the only time when the government must interfere with the private wealth generated by the free market.
In all other cases the government does not have to do a thing (apart from figuring out ways of collecting relevant amount of taxes to cover the BI as indicated by the free market).
Since the model does not discriminate against human age and circumstances it will allow for healthy young adults to accumulate somewhat more capital (disposable income) over the early years of their lives which they may chose to invest in projects/businesses or specialized education when they become more mature and experienced.
For people with addictive habits the government will continue to provide advice, help and control (if necessary) related to the use of their BI.
Given enough time the proposed market based model for BI and MW will reduce the wealth gap and will redistribute wealth to resemble a Gaussian curve of distribution (i.e. most wealth in the hands of most people a.k.a. it will create a strong middle class). Also, it will create agile economy that fully utilizes the human potential. It will make it more difficult for businesses and governments to exert economic, political and behavioural control over the human beings thus making the society more democratic. It will create diversity thus strength in the face of adversity.

In a world where “Space is the final frontier” we should try to create economic and political constructs that rise above simplistic views about our human nature, constructs that see our species as one sentient organism capable of reaching the stars and making the Universe our playground.

Disputing Citizenship, a review

by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 5, 2015 | Opinion

John Clarke, Kathleen Coll, Evelina Dagnino and Catherine Neveu, Disputing Citizenship, Policy Press, 2014, viii + 214 pp, hbk, 1 4473 1252 9, £70, pbk, 1 4473 1253 6, £21.99

The authors of this book come from the UK, the USA, Brazil, and France, and in all of these countries they find evidence for their major contention: that there is so much conflict over the keyword ‘citizenship’ because citizenship is a focus for conflict within society – which of course makes conflict over the idea different in each of the four countries. Citizenship therefore has no fixed or ‘proper’ meaning, but instead has a diverse history of complex meanings – click here to learn more about citizenship and immigration laws.

In recent years, the broader definition of what it means to be a citizen of a particular location have changed. For example wealthy investors can now acquire Dominica citizenship by investment real estate. Other locations around the globe also offer similar citizenship by investment strategies and motives.

In their first chapter the authors ‘recentre’ citzenship to the margins of society where people do not experience the full benefits of their or others’ understandings of citizenship.

Citizenship is both exclusionary and aspirational, the object of desire and the product of dispute, as well as a dispute in itself. (p.49)

In the second chapter they ‘decentre’ citizenship by showing how its connection to a variety of social actors decentres it from state governments and bureaucracies. Citizenship therefore becomes less of a legal status and more of a discourse about the relative strengths of different political and social actors. The authors might usefully have mentioned the Scottish independence referendum as a location for conflict over citizenship and – whichever side had won – as a decentring of citizenship from Westminster.

The third chapter shows how diverse the many locations of citizenship discourse are, and how this means that the concept is always under construction and never in any sense fully defined. The UK in particular represents a patchwork of levels at which citizenship is exercised and contested: the UK, its four separate nations, local government, and such institutions as schools: and here we see most clearly the authors’ understanding of citizenship as a social process rather than as a legal status (which for most people living in England it is only in an ambiguous form anyway, because we are the subjects of a monarch and without a legally defined citizenship – except for immigrants who have passed the citizenship test and attended a town hall ceremony and are therefore in some ways more ‘citizens’ than the rest of us).

Given the authors’ agenda it is no surprise that the book is ‘undisciplined’, by which the authors mean that it does not fit neatly into such disciplines as political economy, but instead wanders across disciplinary boundaries in order to understand the conflicts around citizenship and the context-specific nature of understandings of it. Where the authors do find coherent theories of citizenship (for instance, Marshall’s), they show that such theories are as context-specific as the conflicts around citizenship.

This book is seriously interesting to those of us committed to debate on the desirability and feasibility of a Citizen’s Income – whether or not we call an unconditional and nonwithdrawable income for every individual a Citizen’s Income or a Basic Income – because a nation state’s definition of citizenship will influence who in that state’s territory (and outside it) will receive a Citizen’s Income, and the granting of a Citizen’s Income will affect that nation’s understanding of citizenship. Means-tested and contributory benefits systems fragment the population of a country. A Citizen’s Income would go to every legal resident (and perhaps in some cases to people living abroad), so citizenship at every societal level would inevitably become more inclusive.

The ways in which benefits systems are determined by a country’s diverse understandings of citizenship, and the ways in which a benefits system in turn contributes to understandings of citizenship, would be a fascinating future project for the authors of this book.

[This review was first published in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, 2015, issue 3.]

THE DECIDER CLASS: Gatekeepers in the System

by Guest Contributor | Sep 28, 2015 | Opinion

by Karen Christine Patrick.

DECIDER from the Urban Dictionary:
“A person who decides what is best.”

Twenty plus years dealing with “the system” in being the caregiver for my disabled daughter, then injury and being disabled myself, I have run the gauntlet of the “deciders” too many times to count. People who tell me that the Basic Income Guarantee is “socialist” have no idea what they are talking about if they are worried about “big government” or “the nanny state” because it’s here already in the United States, alive, but not well. Instead of taking the cue from Martin Luther King Jr. and others, way back in the day, we went the way of the deciders. I learned this term recently, “deciders” from the Urban Dictionary online. Sometimes “slang” words pin it just right. Instead of self-empowered individuals making their own decisions as to provisioning their daily life, we have an army, many battalions of deciders who decide FOR grown adults what they should eat, what they should wear, where they should live… if they “deserve” anything they things they are asking for. In a recession, where one cannot just simply go and fill out a resume or application, and show up to the job, to get the money to buy what is needed, this is enforced “learned helplessness.” The deciders have decided that we need them, and it’s enforced.

I can attest to “angels in the system” so for people in the social work class who are not only doing their job well, but still care deeply for people… this is not about you. This is about your co-workers who’s body shows up to shuffle the paperwork, but their mind and heart are absent, who stick by the rules even if the “rules” are just guidelines, are badly trained or misinformed. These are the deciders who make of the system a labyrinth of despair. There are also the devils of the system, the ones for whom my mother said, “would break the wings off of butterflies.” Our bureaucratic system acts as a dank, dark cellar system that warehouses human “resources” made from our most vulnerable citizens, the “precariat” with no other door to walk through. The potential for predation is truly there. Our “nanny state’ is just the kind of hunting grounds for that darker type, a natural habitat for psychopaths and sociopathic behavior that uses the rules as a ruler to whack you on the knuckles with if you get it “wrong” with a larger authority and less advocacy. The ability to decide the fates of people everyday, when one is frustrated and angry, to have a ready whipping post of authority of some kind, is too much of a temptation for some to resist, unfortunately.

Our system of “benefits” is at the mercy of the deciders. Deciders decide at every step of any process. Deciders methodologies are a product of a system that provisions “departments with budgets’ instead of “dividends for citizens”, thus paying the deciders and the “clients” out of the same pool of funds. This creates a natural competition for resources, a contrived animosity, a power play-between “deserving” clients and the ones who decide who is deserving. There are always plenty of deserving clients, especially in a scarcity economy. This is problematic for deciders, because they are outnumbered. However, they are in the system and of it, and know what the clients do not know, know how to make sure that they are provisioned first, and the clients after. They are playing the insider game, knowing they must pay out something to be seen as productive and deserving of budgets, but also knowing the strategies to maintain the superior position and creating a system-within-the-system hierarchy that gives them maximum decider leverage.

It’s human nature, so they say, to take care of number one. No matter how many times the “non-discrimination” policies are printed on forms, documents and other paperwork, humans discriminate. Training for FBI agents include the idea of the power of “mirroring,” a technique relying on the fact that we are most favorably drawn to, supportive of, those almost exactly like we are, with whom we identify. It would be the first tenet of decidership, if they are to decide, the are doing so on the basis of alike-ness subconsciously. Second, decidership is motivated by the tyranny of the urgent. Which is decided first, the client’s paperwork on the desk, or the demand of a superior in the system? The third tenet of decidership is the fear paradigm. The overt and covert threats of loss of status, loss of the comfort zone, loss of job security, the more motivating it is to make decisions based on how the decisions affect them personally, rather than with any concern about any part of any particular case. I’ve observed personally that you are in peril if your case is being heard just after a budget meeting threatening cuts or benefits loss for the employees of the department. Or just before or just after lunch. It’s a key point to ask the question, if you are in the system, are you a person, or a case?

I didn’t know the term for the procedure, but I invented one, “Case Stacking” what I saw watching what was going on in state government while living in a state capital city. I knew some of the state employees and heard them talk among themselves or complain about the way state business was handled. There was so much competition between departments, all requesting money from the state legislature that I saw this game that goes like this… human services departments are designed to process in as many cases as they can so they can show to the legislature during appropriations, “See, we have ALL these CASES. It’s soooo overwhelming” and then when they get their budget amount assigned which of course will NEVER provision the entire case load, especially here now in the age of American Austerity. The game continues to the next level. What happens is then, the first provisioning out of the budget is to pay the employees of the department. In recent years, budget cuts were ordered on the backs of the state employees resulting in job cuts, furloughs, reduction of benefits, and workers having to help codify their jobs technically so that automation, phone bots, and websites can replace functions, or eliminate their jobs. Now you have pissed-off and insecure, defensive deciders even before any funds are then assigned to the clients.

The constant drumbeat of how we need to save money and eliminate fraud, which is always pinned on the client population, never the decider population, is ringing in the ears as provider deciders meet with clients on the front line of the austerity war. The word “handicapped” was created from the idea of a disabled person having their cap in their hand, begging. We do have beggars on the street of our cities, but most of the cap-in-hand begging goes on in whitewash wall offices where it’s hidden away. The deciders are in cramped state offices, with piled up in-boxes, on phones, on computers, having to make so many decisions on so many things that deciding isn’t even personal so much anymore, it’s a machine growing larger every day with a reduction in human components. The client is faced with navigating a system that is just like the classical labyrinth, running blind, basic human needs in peril, waiting for decider action for food, shelter, money for bills, healthcare. And there is a monster in that labyrinth, the “minotaur of minutiae”, cowed by “the code” the decider’s rulebook which shifts and changes often, like sliding panels in this labyrinth. It is fiddled with all the time by deciders at the upper echelons, elected deciders who have promised to “do something” about poverty, homelessness, starvation. They do almost anything but give money, the lifeblood, the first choice of trade, directly to people as a Basic Guaranteed Income, but would rather maintain the decider class.

The decider class transcends all levels of society. The upper echelon decider class also presides over the activities of the middle class, deciders who decide things in your governments of all level, the cost of utilities to homes, deciders in financial institutions and banking, deciders in healthcare, education, professional licensing, taxes, getting permits, etc etc. These deciders are gremlins of another sort altogether who need appeasing with the paperwork having to be “right” and all fees paid, leaving the middle tiers also competing for that rubber-stamp, “Approved.” The palpable fear of becoming poor, of falling into the ranks of the ‘precariat” drives the compliance of the working classes.

It is from the middle class where the recruits to the ranks of the decider class come from. I would wager most deciders don’t like their jobs, especially any deciders with true human value and feelings left, the empathetic and kind, and knowing the deprivations of the system as they do, if they were not under threat themselves. Especially this would be true these days, in the scarcity economy of the “good job” that actually still, “pays the bills.” Watching the grotesque show from behind the curtains has to be frightening and heartbreaking. Those “angels in the system” are trying to save who they can, like rescuers on a sinking ship, as a triage team made by political necessity.

What drives it all now, this scarcity-driven human-provisioning machine, is no longer basic “making a living” issues but a clear and present fear. Nobody wants to end up in the precariat class where the next level down is completely down and out, irretrievably lost. It’s around us all the time, it is ourselves, friends, or family members falling into the pit, or just experiencing a failure to thrive, or not being able to be independent or able to formulate/maintain households. Our consensus reality show, political polemic, suggests it’s some defect in the people themselves, but in reality it is the failure of human leadership pointing the finger at those who cannot fight back.

We have an exciting idea to change the whole paradigm, to implement that we want people to be re-empowered to decide for themselves. We have a way to disband the decider class, reversing the learned helplessness that permeates the economic outlook in this state of global austerity. Those those about to lose their decider jobs, we say, “It’s nothing personal, we just don’t want to need you anymore.” The current system, having been given a large amount of resources is just not doing the job to rid of poverty, is not distributing resources fairly, nor is it fitting our notion that an economy is based on people making personal decisions. Not only do we need a Basic Income Guarantee, but, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, it should not be too low or it relegates a large group of people to being locked into poverty. This Basic Income Guarantee “floor” for people to stand on, we will completely change this decider/client paradigm.

It becomes obvious that a lot of current members of the decider class, who have been dependent on a poverty class as a reason to exist, will lose their jobs. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Those who work at processing poverty, who currently benefit by poverty because it has become an industry will be without a job when we eradicate poverty for real. But they will be provisioned by a Basic Income Guarantee until they transition to doing whatever comes next. Many social workers got into the field “to help people.” They would be free to really help people in a hands-on way instead of a paper-pushing way. This might be a very satisfying thing in the long-run, especially for those who really, deeply want to make a difference in the lives of people.

The day after a Basic Income Guarantee goes into effect, that does not mean people are not going to need each other, or that we won’t need some deciders for people who truly are disabled or incapacitated, it’s just that the process of helping or being helped won’t have a huge complexity to it that creates false hope and false work. For the precariat, from peril-to-provision will be a welcome change. I think the Basic Income Guarantee is a good, humane decision, even for the people currently in the decider class ultimately.

For more from Karen Christine Patrick, visit her blog