Basic income as a human right

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Yes that's the gist of it. The #1 cause of poverty is literally the fact that all they earn is spent on immediate needs like food and housing, leaving nothing to build a future upon. Now, before many jump on the 'get another job' or 'work 2 jobs' and such, you need to understand that poverty itself is not about the person not working or not working enough, its about the income level they have from those jobs earning them just enough to stay alive until the next paycheck. Raising the minimum wage does not do anything to help the poor simply because all it all does is raise prices everywhere over time until the market returns to the situation it once was in... Seattle and many other $15 minimum wage places will find this out in a few more years...though granted it will help a bunch of people get out of poverty until the market normalizes again but in the long term it will only pull people out of poverty if said poor people LEAVE Seattle before the market normalizes.

Why? Once it normalizes they're back to their wage only covering their basic needs in a market that has had its prices inflated by the raise in minimum wage (long term = a decade or so btw). Once that happens, the money they saved during the initial $15 hike will either end up gone quickly paying for the upkeep of what they bought to improve their lives (like, a house or a student loan or what not) or if they saved it in the bank they'll end up burning through it because the cost of living in Seattle at the time will be back to their old minimum-wage-work-to-eat-nothing-more condition.

Read this summary and then read the book if you can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

The basic income concept works precisely because it is universal and it does not require the person to have to be pressed into wage-slavery merely to survive. It does not help the wealthy but it helps the poor significantly. Finally, the market increasing its prices because of a basic income is not something that would happen like it will do with a minimum wage increase because the costs of the wage increase falls on the sources of employment while basic income does not. It comes from tax collected from all strata of society.

One thing the article left out is that applying basic income, in order to work, also requires the removal of tax and fees on food items, clothing and housing. This is done because those basic items are what the basic income is supposed to support people getting so you cannot be giving out tax money and then recovering some of it in the form of taxes.

In Canada we have social assistance for the unemployed, disabled and elderly. It's not a lot, but subsidized housing is available. Still some people fall through the cracks and end up homeless or in prison.

I think that with increased mechanization, low skilled jobs are not as available as they once were. Even retail is cutting out the sales clerk with on line and self-checkout.

There are always going to be those who for whatever reason cannot take care of themselves. I think it's better for society to manage these people (of which I am one) rather than leave them to self-destruction. I'm not sure that people have a right to this support, but I think society should take care of it's weak.

I think it's too extreme to call universal income a right. It makes it too easy for critics to come up with counterarguments. If they can prove it's not a right then they can dismiss the entire notion without further argument. However, if universal income existed, it needn't be called a right. Just 'cause it's not called a right that doesn't mean we can't dole it out. We'll say it's a universal bonus that results from living in a beneficent society.

it would be better treated as social insurance. just make it so that everybody who made less than a certain amount gets an income boost similar to an earned income tax credit but on steroids, and for people who can't work, like a regular disability payment out of the same program. if, like will rogers proposed nearly a century back, you put a transaction tax on all wall street business, you'd have enough money for it even without the top income tax brackets.

That’s an interesting point. However, as the usual libertarian reply goes, who gets to decide what is necessary? A millionaire might decide it’s more necessary that they live a very slightly more luxurious life than it is for some poor stranger not to starve or die from a disease they can’t get treated.

So that’s the point: technology causes the owners of the means of production to need the rest of the population less and less. We, as people, are not necessary, so our death or suffering is no loss. No wonder those of us who prove to be the most dispensable are regarded with contempt, with some rhetoric or other. The only way to be necessary is to start your own business and succeed. Again, this probably means offering goods and services falling more and more into the category you call “unnecessary work”, because your potential customers’ more essential needs have long been covered without justifying the existence of so many people who might work to provide for them.



Anyway, who gets to impose their criteria on anything, what is necessary being no exception? Whoever wins by force. A revolution would be an attempt to change the status quo by force. But that’s all. Just because someone wants to take something from you by force doesn’t mean you should yield. That’d be cowardly, and, if you’re going to lose your livelihood and be left to starve or be killed on the streets, like your very assailant, there’s simply no point in any behavior other than fighting to the death. Heroes of liberty would fight till either they honorably die defending their property, or all their would-be robbers have been killed or turned away to go rob or starve elsewhere.

If there’s enough carnage, the population may be reduced enogh for all survivors either to own some of the necessary means of production or to be truly needed by the owners for some tasks where human assistance is irreplaceable. The only thing the revolution would have achieved is to replace some property owners or people whose existence is otherwise justified by others, while still letting the masses left with no justification for their existence die. You could call that natural selection doing its job: “I’m stronger than you, so I claim justice according to the law of the jungle by honorably killing you and taking over your life. Everything else stays the same, except for the benefit of having my genes in the gene pool, which I’ve proven to be better than yours”.

Another point that should be noted is that, if there were no welfare, there’d never be anything close to that 80% unemployement rate, because those who can’t provide for themselves or aren’t saved by private charity would be dying all the time, instead of building up to become a significant part of the population. So libertarians have a point to blame the welfare state for creating the problems it promises to solve. Population would smoothly deflate over time, keeping only the members the law of the jungle determines to be necessary.



That shouldn’t really happen, other than as short-term fluctuations. The people who can’t afford the products will die of starvation or be killed when they try to steal to survive, unless they manage to take over some better-off person’s life as mentioned above. This happens precisely because the business owners and the employees who can actually afford to survive don’t need anything from them. They can survive on their own. To take this to the extreme, it’s as if you lived alone in a small island, growing your own food, having your own machinery to do things efficiently, including everything needed to produce more machinery and keep it in good repair. If suddenly a castaway shows up, you need nothing from them. The only way they can survive is by stealing something from you. You have no need to make anything affordable to them, and there’s no way you can “go out of business”, unless they successfully fight you and seize your property, thus leaving you to die instead of them.

If the millionaire wants, for example, a bigger mansion then I have no problem with him having one built. Why I say we need to get the necessary work done, I don't mean that only enough work should be done to provide everyone with the necessities of living. I'm not saying that the entire population should be reduced to a spartan lifestyle, living on bread and water with no luxuries or entertainment just to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done. I'd rather work 8 hours per day and be able to afford entertainment for the other 8 waking hours of the day then work 2 hours per day and have absolutely no entertainment for the other 14 waking hours. So much boredom would completely defeat the purpose of having more free time.

When I say what is necessary, I don't mean what people need to survive and nothing more, I mean what people want, including entertainment and luxuries. My point before wasn't that we should reduce work hours, even at the expense of having to live a spartan lifestyle, my point was that if we have a percentage of the population that's unemployed, we shouldn't accuse them of not pulling their weight, as though there's some unfilled job that they're not doing. If you look not at money but at goods are services being produced, then society can probably stand to have a certain percentage of unemployed people.

I know many people work producing luxury goods and I have no problem with that at all since there's a demand for luxury goods. If someone is willing to pay for that stuff than making it is a legit job. I guess even rich people don't want too much of that stuff or else the production of it would absorb all the job-seeking population into employment (I know this a simplified example).

So it's not that I think we shouldn't work to make anything but what we absolutely need, it's that I don't think people should be expected to work to make things that no one even wants. More importantly, we shouldn't shame people for not finding non-existent jobs. If there's a city with 1,000,000 million workers and 900,000 jobs, then the 100,000 who don't find jobs shouldn't shamed and punished (before you tell them to move, let's say that the other cities are in similar situations). If you try to force someone to do something that's impossible, it won't help.

Whatever amount of luxury goods the market wants, that demand is already being met. Since our basic needs AND our desire for luxury goods are both being met without employing 100% of the population, for that reason I think we can allow some fraction of them to not work.

As you say the rich guy might want a more luxurious lifestyle. In your example he wants more money for himself so maybe he fires half his workers to cut costs. That's not what I meant. If the rich guy wants more luxury goods or a bigger mansion, I have no problem with him buying goods made by someone or hiring construction workers to build his mansion since those things don't cause unemployment. I don't even mind if he does cause unemployment.

If he buys more modern equipment for his factory and then fires half his workers without increasing the wages for the other half, I don't even mind that. But if this rich guy's factory is the main employer for a small town (simplified example) and he fired half his workers, then he shouldn't act surprised that the town now has a 50% unemployment rate. He shouldn't shame the 50% of the town's populace who aren't working, he shouldn't try to deny them welfare and he shouldn't accuse them of refusing to work when they were quite willing to show up for work before he fired them.

To answer your question, who decides what is necessary (not in terms of how much money is produced but in terms of how many goods and services are produced) the answer is the free market. Maybe necessary was a bad choice of word on my part but I don't want everyone to take a vow of poverty so less work needs to be done. What is "necessary" (not quite the right word) can include luxury goods and services well above the bare necessities for life so long as there's a consumer demand for it (if they're willing to pay for it, let them have it). I just don't want people to be expected to find work when there's not even a consumer demand for them to work, let alone a need.

In this respect, I think the free market is a good thing, that it doesn't make everyone live like spartans and allows for the production of luxury goods so long as there's a buyer. I'm not completely against the free market. I can think of several other benefits to the free market and some major problems with it. The problem I'm trying to address is when the free market doesn't demand a lot of goods and so demands less workers and yet they still expect a 100% employment rate. Impossible so we shouldn't act surprised when it doesn't happen.

This is one area where the invisible hand doesn't work (even though Libertarians say the invisible hand alone is all that's needed to solve every single problem of society including unemployment and low wages (not gonna happen). I think we should retain the free market to produce whatever goods people want. Go into an electronics store and look at all the gadgets and marvels and remember they only got that good through market competition.

If you lived in a true communist state (not China) where everything is run by the government, including manufacturing, the government run electronics factory wouldn't come up with gadgets anywhere near as good because they'd have a monopoly. Look at the consumer electronics used in the USSR. They were of poor quality (I think there are other problems with communism a well, I don't want to live under communism).

So I think the free market is just fine and supports many people in a lifestyle of middle-class luxury but there needs to be a safety-net for when the invisible hand doesn't provide everyone with a job. What we have in my country is a complex safety-net system that mostly gets the job done, and needs thousands of workers to do so. We have our share of right whingers who pretend the job seekers are "refusing to work" or the disability pensioners are faking it. They resent having to pay for it but in that case, why not come up with a simpler, more efficient system so they don't also have to pay for tens of thousands of workers to drive the massive bueracracy that makes up our welfare state.

The right whingers don't see that. Some time ago there was a politician in America (I don't recall his name) who was condemning tax-funded universal healthcare. He said he didn't want to pay for paupers to go to the GP and they should just go to the ER where they can get free treatment.

It's surprising that a Republican politician of all people wouldn't get the concept that nothing's free. Of course treatment in an ER isn't free. Someone has to pay for it. Doesn't it come from the taxpayer? The trouble is, having non-emergency health problems being treated at the ER would cost a lot more than just paying for the paupers to see a GP.

That's what bugs me about these people. They're so obsessed with saving money that they'd spend a dollar to save a dime. They don't care about efficiency. Society has gotten so upset by the idea of welfare overpayment that they spend far more money on debt collection than the amount of debt they collect. If the safety-net was a modest universal income, welfare fraud would be impossible so we wouldn't have to pay debt collectors.


So that’s the point: technology causes the owners of the means of production to need the rest of the population less and less. We, as people, are not necessary, so our death or suffering is no loss. No wonder those of us who prove to be the most dispensable are regarded with contempt, with some rhetoric or other. The only way to be necessary is to start your own business and succeed. Again, this probably means offering goods and services falling more and more into the category you call “unnecessary work”, because your potential customers’ more essential needs have long been covered without justifying the existence of so many people who might work to provide for them.



Anyway, who gets to impose their criteria on anything, what is necessary being no exception? Whoever wins by force. A revolution would be an attempt to change the status quo by force. But that’s all. Just because someone wants to take something from you by force doesn’t mean you should yield. That’d be cowardly, and, if you’re going to lose your livelihood and be left to starve or be killed on the streets, like your very assailant, there’s simply no point in any behavior other than fighting to the death. Heroes of liberty would fight till either they honorably die defending their property, or all their would-be robbers have been killed or turned away to go rob or starve elsewhere.

If there’s enough carnage, the population may be reduced enogh for all survivors either to own some of the necessary means of production or to be truly needed by the owners for some tasks where human assistance is irreplaceable. The only thing the revolution would have achieved is to replace some property owners or people whose existence is otherwise justified by others, while still letting the masses left with no justification for their existence die. You could call that natural selection doing its job: “I’m stronger than you, so I claim justice according to the law of the jungle by honorably killing you and taking over your life. Everything else stays the same, except for the benefit of having my genes in the gene pool, which I’ve proven to be better than yours”.

Another point that should be noted is that, if there were no welfare, there’d never be anything close to that 80% unemployement rate, because those who can’t provide for themselves or aren’t saved by private charity would be dying all the time, instead of building up to become a significant part of the population. So libertarians have a point to blame the welfare state for creating the problems it promises to solve. Population would smoothly deflate over time, keeping only the members the law of the jungle determines to be necessary.



That shouldn’t really happen, other than as short-term fluctuations. The people who can’t afford the products will die of starvation or be killed when they try to steal to survive, unless they manage to take over some better-off person’s life as mentioned above. This happens precisely because the business owners and the employees who can actually afford to survive don’t need anything from them. They can survive on their own. To take this to the extreme, it’s as if you lived alone in a small island, growing your own food, having your own machinery to do things efficiently, including everything needed to produce more machinery and keep it in good repair. If suddenly a castaway shows up, you need nothing from them. The only way they can survive is by stealing something from you. You have no need to make anything affordable to them, and there’s no way you can “go out of business”, unless they successfully fight you and seize your property, thus leaving you to die instead of them.[/quote]I'm not condoning an armed rebellion. Rather I'm saying that's better avoided and if we don't let poverty grow larger and larger we can nip that in the bud. I'd rather have a revolution in policy than literally have a revolution.

Don't say it's impossible to have a revolution. It's happened in the past. Just ask the French and the Russians. Poor people are quite capable of staging a revolt if they're desperate enough. Some people have said we should let the unemployed starve until they find a job because "hunger is a good motivator for them to work". Not quite. I think if I was starving I would do very poorly in a job interview. I think if I was starving and I got a job I would be fired for poor job performance before I was able to collect my first week's paycheck.

However, while hunger may not motivate people to be more charismatic in job interviews or better job performance while they wait for their first paycheck, hunger certainly can motivate people to violence. Just ask the French and the Russians.

Even after a successful revolt, the rebels can be quite vindictive to their former leaders. They may want to execute them by means of guillotine or firing squad. I'd rather avoid such violence. I'm not condoning revolution. Want I want is to eliminate the poverty that causes revolution.I guess people would be truly starving if the supermarket goes out of business, if people couldn't even afford food (the supermarket would soon be looted) but what I mean is the producers of luxury goods would go out of business if people were so poor they could only afford the essentials.

For a counter-example, look at Henry Ford who was greatly able to increase his sales by paying double the standard factory wage so his huge staff of workers could afford to buy cars. Most of the extra wages were spent buying the company's products and so the company made up for the extra-expense of paying higher wages.

In our society most production is not spent on the essentials of survival. Most of the plutocrats who want to downsize their workforce and then deny their former workers welfare are making things that aren't strictly necessary for survival. People would stop buying minor luxuries long before they were unable to afford even food but if these tycoons think they can get richer by expanding the pauper-class, they may soon find they have a massive reduction in sales when no one can afford to buy their products.No they can't. Farmers could probably survive on their own. The Amish could definitely survive on their own. Business owners couldn't survive in isolation just as shopkeepers couldn't survive without customers. Business owners certainly need something from us. They need customers. They may have more money than us but that money wouldn't exist in isolation.

Now you're just being ridiculous.

Giving it to people who also work would be pointless. Also, the increased tax for this program to pay people so they can have better stuff would end up ruining a lot of people who are just getting by. We are barely getting by. If we had to pay out for this program then we would go under. Especially since you said that people would be taxed more than what they get. Even paying an extra one hundred dollars a month would kill us.

Also, while seeing collegues and feeling like your job is somewhat important are good things, we can also get that in regular life. You can see people without going to work and do things outside of work that seem important to you.

Yes, society will change, but thank God it won't change to waste that amount of money on a program that won't do any good for most people.

FALSE - The Government of Singapore distributes money to everybody each year, including workers, but as an incentive to work, and there are no homeless people in that country either, and actual programs that effectively get people into housing if they're even attempting to live out on the streets (for which nobody there does as there is no reason there for anybody to do such things).


FALSE - The tax in Singapore has remained at a continuously low 3% with such program and they're not short of any kind of growth of economy.


The reason that Americans are barely getting by has more to do with the average intellectual-levels of the average American being absolutely astoundingly and absurdly utterly stupid than it does to do with where things that actually cost something. The amount currently spent on these so-called welfare-programmes is to recipients is a meager less than 1% of all tax-revenues collected whilst over, and I mean WELL-OVER 65% of the ENTIRE BUDGET goes into CREATING UNNECESSARY WARS that cost BILLIONS of dollars every year (this is PROVEN in the Grace-Commission Report). You have already made MANY FALSE and seem to think that your opinions are somehow factual.

Why don't you do some actual studying & research ? Why don't you bother double-checking the facts & figures (like the ACTUAL facts & figures such as from the Grace Commission Report), but from the sounds of all of the clap-trap that you've posted thus far, I can probably wager that you've never even bothered to watch a single documentary about The Federal Reserve in your life, because that sort of behaviour is typical of your typical ignorant American.

Yet you people have no qualms about wasting over 9000x that said amount of money on war-mongering. Also... have another load of this guy again because obviously he's actually intelligent and has actually done his homework.... unlike SOME Americans...

Also, retrogamer has made some of the most well-analysed posts in this thread, and his statements are backed up with actual facts and figures, and he has clearly done his homework, but on the other hand there will always be those types who seem to want to do nothing but argue due to their arrogance & vanity & false pride (you know, the types of people who are quick to take credit for anything that might sound positive, but pointèdly avoid & ignore anything negative that they may have been responsible for: They tend to be called politicians and I do not lend any credibility to people who act like one).

P.S.: Don't even try to bring up that « get annoyed » crap with me over that Larken Rose video either because, for one, the length is only 20 minutes, a meager 20 minutes (not like it's a 3-hour documentary), and the laziness of willful-ignorance when you continue to « parrot » rubbish that was already disproven from both him in the video & others who've posted in this thread is itself an indication that we're dealing with an annoying parrot (parrots, yes, parrots, because some political-circles call them useful-idiots).

Last edited by Ban-Dodger on 06 Jul 2015, 12:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

So it's FALSE that we are just barely getting by? BS. We are just barely getting by. And, it's not because of how much things cost and how much my husband makes it's because we are not intellectual enough for you? Really? Because that is not gonna fly in the real world.

Also, you are going way over the top with this. It's just a discussion. I'm also not obsessed with it, and while I do have time to discuss this in a thread on the forum I don't have time to research it to discuss it. Our discussion really isn't that important you know. I have housework to do, I have a family to take care of, I have a grocery list to make, I need to touch up my roots tonight before my daughter goes to bed so she can help me, and I want to mix up some honey buns so they can rise overnight and I can cook them in the morning for breakfast. Other things are more important than watching your Bubba on YouTube and looking up statistics so I can sound better to you, some obsessed sounding dude on the internet.

It really doesn't matter you know, it's just a discussion on a forum on the internet. But, if you don't have much else going for you then feel free to get as obsessed and obnoxious about it as you want to. However, I'm not going to be reading your posts anymore because you have started to annoy me. Decide I'm not reading them for whatever reason you want, and make sure it's one that makes me look bad and you look good, and then get in the last word to me because I know you need that, but after that I really wouldn't bother responding to me in this thread because I'm not gonna read it. I'm really not even gonna read your last word to me but you can pretend I am if you want. You know, like you seem to be pretending that this discussion matters to anybody except those of us who are in it.

The « real » world...? More like the « extortionist » world in which you chose to live through your own ignorance. You obviously don't know how to reduce costs, nor do you know how to not spend unnecessarily on things that you don't actually need, and you probably believe that there's an actual law that requires you to file an income-tax (there isn't).

I already had enough of that « extortionist » s**t from government in my life so yes I'm going to smack everyone upside the head who even dares try to promote perpetuating that kind of a system. You seem to have lots of time to read & post on these forums (see your own post-count-to-join-date), yet you make excuses (like a typical NT about all these house-chores [I used to work sometimes two entire full-time shifts of 80+ hours in a week and still managed to keep everything clean & tidy & spotless]) when it comes to calling you out on your proven-to-be-false bull-shit about the results of taxation, despite the fact that you've very « ARROGANTLY » dismissed (yet you claim to call it a discussion when in reality you're not actually discussing anything, you are just parroting false information, and in an argumentative manner) what others have posted when we've had plenty of experience in dealing with this « real » world that you seem to think is actually real (the « legal-system » actually has more to do with deceiving you & frauding you out of your money than it has to do with being anything of actual value in an actual real-world).

Some of us have literally spent hundreds of hours on these kinds of topics, and if you're just going to respond with « spitting » all over the FACTS that we've presented, then you should be prepared for its consequences. Even if you don't read my posts (because of your politician-like behaviour), others will, and they will PROBABLY also even QUOTE me in response to you, I don't care, they will likely end up making you read it even if you claim that you are going to ignore me from here onwards (this is a clear indication that I should really just ignore you from here onward).

yes there is, it's Title 26 Subtitle A Chapter 1(the relevent subchapters are A and B) of the US Code

A Statute is not a Law. Perhaps you should learn something about Legalese & Legal-Definitions.

A Statute or a Code does NOT constitute a Law. Get back to me after you've done some actual homework.

Additionally, Statute-Codes apply to Federal-Employees, not your average individual.

statutes are legal instruments, you're wrong about there being no tax law. also, youtube videos aren't credible sources, hope this helps!

http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/jsiegel/ ... tNoLaw.htm

26 U.S.C. § 1
There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of every individual . . . who is not a married individual a tax determined in accordance with the following table:

And you're trying to claim that The Government IS a 'credible' source of information ? Really now ?

Furthermore, you clearly don't seem to know the Legal-Definition of Income, nor the Legal-Defintion of Persons, and here's some background-informtion for you, Income-Tax is in reference to gains from activities such as Stocks, Bonds, and other types of Corporate-Investment activities, and have nothing what-so-ever to do with any wages you've earned from a job.

I am sorry but you're "parrotting" a bunch of babble before even doing your homework. How about you PROVE that "You-Tube Videos are not credible" via taking POINT by POINT every single POINT that this man makes in the following Seminar-Presentation ? Have you ever even BEEN in a court before ? I doubt that you have, and even if you have, you wouldn't be able to navigate your way though its procedures due to your lack of knowing how to speak Legalese...

I HAVE dealt with the court-systems and I KNOW that they operate on the fraud of Legalese-Language. I KNOW this from PERSONAL-experience with having TESTED court-decisions for myself. Have an additional Charlie Sprinkle by the way.