What If The Government Guaranteed You An Income?

[piasabird]

What if bread and meat and cereal fell from the sky? That cant happen either.

 

[SMOGZINN]

It is paying people not to work. It is a terribly destructive idea.

Why? Why is production so important? In a world where more and more is being done with less and less, why is productive work still the gold standard? How do we reconcile this with the fact that there simply is not enough productive jobs for all the people that actually want to work?

I think you have the whole thing completely backwards. Soon there will not be many jobs of any kind left. We are working hard at putting ourselves out of work. What happens with the entire US workforce is down to a few thousand people that manage the robots that do all the other work, including maintaining and repairing each other. That day is fast approaching. What do we do then when your philosophy says that you must work to live, and there is no work? Now who is in the mass graves?

 

[norseamd]

is there some way we can create a system to reward humans for intellectual thought and inventins equal to what we often pay for work

in hunter gatherer societies and ancient civilizations wise men, elders, scholars, and philosophers were often supported by the rest of the community

 

[norseamd]

if we think of a technologically advanced green society that lives in sustainable arcologies what critical thought should we think of?

 

[SMOGZINN]

is there some way we can create a system to reward humans for intellectual thought and inventins equal to what we often pay for work

in hunter gatherer societies and ancient civilizations wise men, elders, scholars, and philosophers were often supported by the rest of the community

Well that is what copyright and patents are supposed to do, but that system got usurped by large corporations and changed to quell competition instead of reward innovation.

 

[norseamd]

Well that is what copyright and patents are supposed to do, but that system got usurped by large corporations and changed to quell competition instead of reward innovation.

but also critical thinking and philosophy and thinking about how to resolve situations and such

 

[PieIsAwesome]

A Basic Income Guarantee or some other restructuring is going to be necessary. Technology is advancing and human labor is in the process of becoming obsolete. There are going to be less and less jobs and less and less money paid for human labor, even though the country's total wealth will be increasing. The increases in wealth will be increasingly concentrated in the few elite. A Basic Income Guarantee will fix this inequality issue. The generators of wealth will be allowed to use the planet's resources to continue generating wealth, in exchange for giving back a fair share to everyone.

 

[Craig234]

A Basic Income Guarantee or some other restructuring is going to be necessary. Technology is advancing and human labor is in the process of becoming obsolete. There are going to be less and less jobs and less and less money paid for human labor, even though the country's total wealth will be increasing. The increases in wealth will be increasingly concentrated in the few elite. A Basic Income Guarantee will fix this inequality issue. The generators of wealth will be allowed to use the planet's resources to continue generating wealth, in exchange for giving back a fair share to everyone.

Here's the ugly thing. While you have a point about the situation and need, there is nothing to force the few most wealthy to 'give back a fair share to everyone', except for democracy, if people vote for that, and our political direction is in the opposite direction - a Supreme Court Justice said, 'you can have high concentration of wealth, or you can have democracy, but not both', and he was pretty right, but we're choosing high concentration of wealth.

As we allow wealth to take over our democracy - to buy public opinion with one-sided media dominance, to buy elections so only candidates who follow their agenda can win - we're making it all but impossible for the country to act to protect the public's well being in the way you describe. Our Republican states can't mostly even accept healthcare for their own citizens paid for entirely by the federal government (for 3 years, then 90%), causing thousands of their own citizens to lose their lives for politics and ideology.

When you look at history at how we have tolerated terrible things for slave labor, for immigrant labor, today for undocumented labor, the main issue here is just the bulk of America falling more into that bucket instead of being a protected group sharing in the wealth of the country - which they always were until about Reagan, and then not.

Think about how hard it is to pass a 'tax increase' even on the rich - even while we pass a massive tax cut for the rich (two, actually) all added to and paid for by our debt.

So this leads to 'but when the people are angry, that'll change'. Not so much anymore. Think about the public having a 90% support for more gun background checks - something not even a central issue for the wealth agenda - including a large majority of Republicans and of NRA members - yet it won't pass, even after mass shootings like Newtown. A thousand people are poised to donate much more than the rest of the country combined to our elections. When politicians need them and not the public to get elected...

That's why the far more organized wealth groups like ALEC are much more effective at getting legislation passed despite it being bad for the public. A large percent of legislation passed in Republican legislatures now is simply handed to them by ALEC to pass, not written by the legislatures. The public does not have the political weight, the organization, for their agenda. Which is why a recent study found that the public has close to zero actual influence on what legislators do - the wealthy are influencing them.

What you're saying has a mroal point - but as a political matter it's not likely to happen.

When the US economy took away massive amounts of Americans' wealth in 2008 and then rebuilt the wealth since - the stock market more than doubling - it's an outrage that an estimated 95% or more of all the recovery has gone to the top 1% - leaving 99% of America without an economic recovery. But where is that outrage in policy? There is none. The very wealthy just continue to get far more wealth and power while the public is flat and has a lower and lower share of both. That is the most important issue by far for the country.

That's the value of groups like the Tea Party to the wealthy interests - it gives a phony place for the angry public to go, but still duped into supporting the wealthy agenda, instead of organizing into effective groups that will represent the public. They act outraged all the time because they're attracting outraged citizens - but using them as pawns. It's sort of 'would you like to join the old group that supports the wealthy, or the phony new protest group that supports the wealthy? You have a choice'.

There is one group that supports the public interest in Washington - the progressive caucus - and they're threatened more and more by the increase of wealth in our elections.

Rather, the planners for the wealthy are planning for more discontent and poverty in the US, and how to deny the power to the people to fight it. Just one part of that is the 'blame the victim' ideology to say that the problem is just the people not 'being willing to do the jobs at competitive wages' competing with the undocumented, the global workforce. Part of it is demonizing any 'liberal' politics to poison them for many Americans not to consider them.

What the people have is numbers and the freedom of speech to provide an alternative movement - as long as they can get people to pay attention and overcome the wealth of the 'vast right-wing propaganda machine' including many things but among them the most popular cable news channel, Fox, and something like 90%+ of talk radio.