PEOPLE GET READY! THE FIGHT AGAINST A JOBLESS ECONOMY & A CITIZENLESS DEMOCRACY, McChesney & Nichols

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7. Experiments with basic income for millions of people who will be unemployed

by the Technological Revolution are being explored now mainly in Europe. Governments and the best thinkers and leaders need to really begin collaborative efforts to address this massive transformation before it's too late. The US is a fiercely free market, neoliberal capitalistic country where the money ethic is deeply ingrained so alternatives will be a certain challenge, unless major innovation takes place. We have many bright people, tremendous resources and are the wealthiest nation on earth as Bernie often says, so there's reason to hope that feasible ideas and plans will develop..
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*WHAT WOULD SOCIETY LOOK LIKE WITH UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME? It may seem blasphemous to neoliberals, but a universal basic wage may be the only choice we have.*, by Laurie Penny, The New Statesman, April 15, 2016.

What would you do if somebody gave you a few hundred pounds each month to spend on whatever you wanted? Would you quit your job? Retrain and look for a better one? Spend more time with your kids? Get those vital repairs done on your house? Eat better food?
I’m not trying to taunt you. Asking anyone who has to work for a living to contemplate a society in which they have proper economic choices feels like asking a friend on a doctor-enforced diet to describe their favourite dessert. But it’s the question being raised by a growing chorus of thinkers and campaigners, from Silicon Valley businessmen to conservative philosophers, who believe that the answer to a snarled web of economic problems – wage inequality, automation and the gender pay gap, among others – is to institute an “unconditional basic income”.

Basic income – the proposal to give a flat, non-means-tested payment to every citizen – is an old idea. It has been around for centuries, and for centuries its proponents have largely been dismissed as utopian, or insane, or both. This year, however, that insanity is gradually becoming a political reality. FINLAND is considering giving its citizens an unconditional stipend of €800 a month and the DUTCH CITY OF UTRECHT is carrying out a similar experiment. SWITZERLAND will hold a referendum on basic income in June.
>Campaigns to get the idea taken seriously are sprouting like mushrooms around the world. In the US, the tech start-up funder Y Combinator is earmarking money to test the theory. In GERMANY, a crowdfunding initiative called Mein Grundeinkommen (“my basic income”) to give a basic wage to as many people as possible has attracted over a quarter of a million contributors. *“Basic income is about power, about letting it go,” Michael Bohmeyer, a former entrepreneur who runs Mein Grundeinkommen, told me. “It’s about trusting people. It gives them the freedom to say no and to ask the question: how do I really want to live? Basic income is not a left-wing idea, or a right-wing one. It’s a humanistic idea. It strengthens human beings against the system and it gives them the freedom to ­rethink it."

That is the sort of freedom that sounds like blasphemy to conventional, liberal, “free-market” economists. In today’s understanding of the economic facts, individuals have the freedom to choose how they are exploited – but they cannot choose to escape exploitation, unless they are born wealthy. Basic income seeks to change that, not just because it is the right thing to do but because the coming labour crisis may soon leave world governments, whatever their orthodoxy, with with no other choice. “If we don’t disconnect work and income, humans will have to compete more and more with computers,” Bohmeyer explains. “This is a competition they will lose sooner than we think. The result will be mass unemployment,” he says, “and no money left for consumption.”

..The notion of an economic system based on trust and mutual aid rather than fear, shame and suffering still sounds like a fairy tale. But as more and more jobs are automated away, as mandatory wage labour collapses as a method of organising society, even the most conservative governments may find themselves with no other option. We have a choice, not just as a society, but as a species. We can choose to let fear and suspicion run our lives as we all struggle harder each year to survive in a collapsing economic system on a smoking planet. Or we can choose to trust each other enough that everyone can share in the rewards of technology. It is blasphemous, unthinkable – but it may also be the only practical choice we have.~ More: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/15/what-would-society-look-universal-basic-income



*FINLAND is planning to provide 800 euros per month to all citizens as a new form of benefit called national basic income. The Finnish government is planning to present the plan by November 2016. (Photo: Flickr/ Euro Note Currency)