Frans Kerver gets a $1,100 per month 'basic income' on top of his normal income.
In the netherlands, Frans Kerver was working 12-hour days as a copywriter.
His wife and three kids rarely saw him.
In 2015, a Dutch organisation started giving Kerver a basic income, on top of his normal income, because of all the important unpaid work he does in the community.
Kerver now receives $1,100 a month on top of his normal income, and no longer has to work 12 hour days on copywriting.
Among his biggest projects is Garden City, a communal agriculture project that Kerver says takes up most of his time.
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December 2013
There is growing interest in the idea that everyone should be given 'a basic income'.
Finland to consider introducing universal basic income in 2017 / New Zealanders want to give everyone a 'citizen's wage' and scrap benefits / Now Canada is trying a basic income
Research shows that "poor people do not stop trying to better their circumstances when they are given a basic income.
"They make productive use of the funds - feeding their families, sending their children to school and investing in businesses and their own futures.
"Even a short-term infusion of capital has been shown to significantly improve long-term living standards, improve psychological wellbeing and even add one year of life."
What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life.
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A charity, GiveDirectly, is aiming to provide thousands of Kenyans with a basic income for at least the next decade in a bid to investigate how a fundamental level of economic freedom could change people's lives.
Charity experiment to see thousands of Kenyans given .
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In the city of Lausanne in Switzerland, residents are soon to receive money for basic needs like food, transport and clothes, regardless of their income or status.
Lausanne basic income.
According to Lausanne's Leonore Porchet: "Basic income offers a solid and securing social floor, as opposed to the fragile social safety net that we know today.
"The freedom provided by basic income encourages activity, social inclusion and innovation.
"In addition it values and supports the 'free' work such as volunteer activities."
Citizens of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, enjoy a basic income scheme - US$1,023 for one adult and more for a couple.
The Swiss authorities are set to hold a referendum on introducing the basic income scheme in June 2016.
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One 2013 study, found people given a basic income actually worked 17% longer hours and received 38% higher earnings than people who never received additional money.
The US may some day revive the UBI policy President Nixon proposed decades ago.
A guaranteed income is a fundamentally flawed concept. Income should be matched to the prices of what is being produced in society--in other words, variable depending on what is available for purchase by consumers. Robotics have solved permanently the issue of producing sufficient goods for all to have a good life in the material sense. The "working class" is an anachronism in an age of automated and computerized production. A new means of getting buying power into the hands of people is needed; the few who will continue to earn income from the residual work that will be done in the future will, quite reasonably, revolt if an effort is made to tax them in order to support payment of a basic income to everyone else. C.H. Douglas's Social Credit proposal for universal dividends based on the shared cultural heritage is the sanest approach to dealing with the new age of abundance.
ReplyDeleteCirca 2000 BC the Babylonians formalised in law both this thing called money and the charging of interest on debt. It is a deliberately engineered system of division and control and its purpose has always been the concentration of power. Tribal societies, that is true human societies outside of the influence of the Babylonian empire, did not use money. Nor is there money in those few remaining tribes that exist outside of the global prison. Human beings traded by barter of surplus and spread surplus by sharing and by gift.
ReplyDeleteIt is naive to believe that any advance in human society can be made whilst clinging to an outmoded and harmful system foisted upon the species by a ruling elite. Money will always draw people to crime, will always produce greed and envy, will always bolster the concentration of power, will always undermine justice, will ultimately always maintain the enslavement of the 99.99% by the masters of this reality.
For humanity to step out of its 5000 year nightmare it must dismantle the carefully constructed control grid that has become so deeply ingrained that few can see it for what it is. These same characters created nations, religions, political parties and political concepts like Marxism and Fascism, their sole object being to divide humanity and render us weak by so doing.
Basic income? Just more bullshit from the same people. I guess it would be created out of thin air as all money is, rendered electronic so in fact being simply numbers, spendable by using a card or later a chip......
We as a species can only get out of this mess by utterly abandoning the money system of exchange. It's for monkeys, and we can do better.
Money is what allows complex economic relationships; there would be no cars, ships, major bridges, electric grids, etc., without it. Barter is practical only in primitive societies. It is the centralizing aspect of money monopoly that must be rectified. Because of the divisibility and distributability of money, this is perfectly feasible. Only our slave conditioning prevents us from demanding the necessary reforms.
Delete"Money is what allows complex economic relationships; there would be no cars, ships, major bridges, electric grids, etc without money".
DeleteNot so.
During the second world war vast and complex undertakings were accomplished and huge technological advances were achieved. Sure, money was made, especially by the same bastards that profit from war now, but for almost everyone else involved (most of whom made enormous peronal sacrifices) the chief motivator was neither wages nor profit but the collective facing of a common threat and the realisation that whatever the thing was it needed doing.
Profit and money actually slow down the rate of human advance. This results from two chief causalities. The first is the ownership of invention via patents (to protect profit and focus benefit on the patent owner, usually corporations, refer to my comment about bastards above), the second is the suppression of inventions that threaten the income streams of existing businesses. This latter almost certainly deprives humanity of free energy, cancer cures, the legalisation of prohibited drugs (for so long a mainstay of the globl elite's funding since the Opium Wars) and much more.
As most thinking people now realise humanity faces the distinct possibiity of self-inflicted extinction. Each element of this careering juggernaut, this vast and now faintly ridiculous instrument of self-destruction, is lubricated by this thing called money. Much of human activity currently achieves nothing except the movement of money. Entire cities operate where almost nobody builds, makes or grows anything. Billions of us are so occupied, unnecessarily, whilst there is much that needs doing. Feeding starving kids, housing those millions that live in shanty towns, caring for those that need care, etc ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
In addition, money deprives humanity of free time, is responsible for enormous misery, causes millions of deaths each year, facilitates a pyramidal control structure that will always be with us so long as we cling to this outmoded and frankly ridiculous system of exchange.
Should our species survive, future generations will look back on money as a curiosity and recognise that we really were dumb monkeys back in the early 21st century, and very easily manipulated and fooled. Our Masters even put their faces on this worthless paper, just to rub it in.
Your contention that the organizational efforts of WWII could have been achieved without the ordering power of money is, frankly, beyond belief. Apparently you imagine that people just get together in a town meeting, decide to build a factory to manufacture Lancaster bombers, and then proceed to churn them out, fully appointed, all spontaneously labouring away, wageless, for the common cause. This belief that complex products can be created and delivered without an ordering system, which is money, is equivalent to the belief in a flat earth. To say that a system is being perverted and misused does not condemn it entirely. Money is one of the greatest of human inventions, in need of fixing, not rejection.
DeleteThese unpaid efforts were "beyond belief" were they?
DeleteRoyal Observer Corp
The Royal Observer Corps was created to detect, track, identify and report aircraft over Britain. It was awarded the 'Royal' title by King George VI in 1941, in recognition of its valiant work during the Battle of Britain during which the volunteers provided RAF Fighter Command with the numbers, type and height of incoming enemy aircraft.
The Home Guard
On 14 May 1940, Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, encouraged men aged 17-65 and unable to serve in the forces to join the Local Defence Volunteers. Within 24 hours, 250,000 men had registered and, by the end of June 1940, nearly 1.5million had volunteered. Weapons were slow to materialise, due in part to the equipment losses at Dunkirk, so many initially improvised with brooms, umbrellas and golf clubs. In July 1940 Winston Churchill changed the name to 'Home Guard'.
The Emergency Services
As war broke out, the Emergency Services began to appeal for volunteers, their usual numbers depleted by military service. The Auxiliary Ambulance Service began recruiting, and Ennis Smith became the youngest ambulance driver aged 16.
The Auxiliary Fire Service (later the National Fire Service) was also created. Its members were usually too old or young for military service and most were unpaid part-timers. Initially perceived as 'service-dodgers', they became public heroes when the Blitz began.
Many police officers also were young men or reservists, so the government and the police authorities had to recruit volunteers to keep up the numbers. Reserve policemen, special constables and women officers were signed up. As well as normal law-keeping duties, they became responsible for checking on enemy aliens, pursuing Army deserters and assisting the rescue services during bombing raids.
Of course you find it difficult to see outside of the money box so carefully constructed over the centuries such that less intelligent humans cannot imagine a world without it, more intelligent humans use it to get more than their share, and very intelligent humans understand that it is currently a necessary evil and will one day pass, hopefully soon.
We humans are playing in a fixed crap game with loaded dice. The answer is not to change the dice, but to walk away from the crap game. As long as there is money there will be human trafficking, drug trafficking, slavery, starvation, greed, envy, vast inequality, etc.
The evil that is money drove the construction of Fukushima and now prevents its dire consequences being known to the world, pays scientists to lie, pays journalists not to report the death of the Pacific ocean, pays politicians not to speak of the terrible consequences that will overshadow humanity and the biosphere for centuries.
Belief in money is like believing that the world is not the centre of the universe.......round or flat.
I'm not sure what role all these fine folk played in delivering the war materiel necessary to winning the conflict (not that ordinary people really won anything). That was produced in factories by people happy to have decent incomes after being WITHOUT MONEY during the so-called Great Depression--supposedly a splendid period from your perspective.
DeleteThe basic income kind of makes capitalism okay. We should be able to give up work for a while without losing our homes, and so be able to recuperate, get the decorating done, or whatever.
ReplyDeleteWe should be able to go to university, or college and get our qualifications without losing our homes either.
With machinery, robots, and computers doing so much work people are having trouble getting jobs. And it's going to get worse:-
Software that can replace psychologists, 3D printing that might soon be able to make almost anything, and Amazon are testing drones for doing deliveries, etc.
The basic Income can increase productivity and entrepreneurship as people would have more time to start their own businesses without the risk, again, of losing their homes. Lots more very capable people would start up businesses.
People who hate work will be able to survive on the Basic Income and this will keep them out of employers way: no one wants lazy people working for them. Most of these people have psychological problems anyway. They might find part time work a lot more attractive because it will increase their take home pay.
The Basic Income will restart the economy as more people will have money to spend. This is the main reason why some economists and politicians are considering it. And it will also increase jobs.
It might not work but where it has been tried it looks promising, and so it should be tried out here. Richard Nixon was going to introduce it in the US but some of the Democrats voted against it berceuse it 'wasn't enough', and after that it disappeared.
If it had been around earlier I would have retired years ago instead of working myself into the ground causing so much chronic ill health. I'm medically retired now and I'm slowly getting better. Capitalism nearly killed me. I'm quite poor but I'm rich with time, and my house is mine. I love my hobbies.
It's a fine idea Aang but the crunch comes when we ask, 'where does the money come from?' If the money disbursed to people in the above fashion is borrowed from reserve banks it's just more debt that must be repaid with interest. If, on the other hand, the money is created by the government debt free (which is precisely what the banks do) then, yes, it will be a boon to society.
ReplyDeleteImagine a nation in which everyone is free from the constraints of earning a pay check. 8,10, or 12 hours extra hours in a day to be used in any way in which you see fit. Want to develop your mind and learn physics or engineering? Want to learn horticulture and plant community gardens? Want to care for the sick and dying? Want to spend every morning cleaning the local beach or riverbank? Want to lay around stoned all day? You could devote a day a week to each of those endeavours or anything else that strikes your fancy. But we're taught from an early age such thoughts are trivial and not to be entertained because money is the carrot, not living life.
ReplyDeleteMoney has replaced time as a thing of value in this world. It becomes absurd when one really thinks about it. Why does money have value? Because an authority claims it has value. Why does time have value? Because we're all given a finite amount of it and none of us know when our individual clock will strike midnight.
Time is more valuable than gold, than oil, or anything else we treat as a commodity. Money is simply a means of conning people into trading their time for baubles.
It's funny to me how when we were in school we laughed and the teacher laughed when we were taught how dumb the Native Americans were, trading away swaths of land for shiny trinkets and a promise of future rewards in the form of treaties.
Yeah, they were simpletons. Not us though. We're really sharp....
kpatrickryan
I really liked your post. Now I've retired I have all the time in the world, and yet each day I don't have enough time to get things done. It's like I need 36 hour days.
Delete'It's funny to me how when we were in school we laughed.....' The Indians weren't dumb; Western propaganda rewrites everything. Those Indians had to sell or die. Most died anyway, it was genocide, the cowboys would hunt them down on horse back with guns for sport. There are hand written accounts of it, one guy described how he chased and shot some Indian women and children. One very young child hid in some bushes, but he chased him out and shot him in the back as he run away. 98% of the native Americans perished. That was how the US was made, now they are hunting down and destroying the world.
I write here an
I can sympathise with you regarding time. I also wonder where time goes to; since I have retired time seems - to me anyway - to have accelerated. Nice to have a lay in though......
DeleteThe Social Credit analysis and remedial recommendations are in an entirely different class compared to the various unsound tax-funded, i.e., re-distributive proposals for a basic or guaranteed income. As early as 1918, C. H. Doulas analyzed the existing price-system and discovered a widening chasm between financial incomes and costs and prices due to the manner in which banks issue and cancel credit in conjunction with the manner in which industrial costs are incorporated into final retail prices. This intrinsic deficiency of effective consumer buying power rapidly expands as technology replaces the need for human labour and non-labour factors compose an increasing component of industrial costs. This gap is presently met by new credits created by banks and charged as an inflationary mortgage upon future production. However, the true physical costs of production are fully met when any good is completed and ready for sale to the consumer. Consumers should always have sufficient effective demand to claim the entire product of industry without resorting to debt. The widening "gap" in the price-system caused by growing non-labour factors of production must be filled without creating new costs and prices.
ReplyDeleteC.H. Douglas dealt scientifically and comprehensively with all of these issues nearly a century ago. He recommended establishment of a National Credit Account, being an actuarial evaluation of the the nation's real credit in the form of all physical resources which if used for production would result in costs and prices. Funds would be drawn down from this NCA to issue National (Consumer) Dividends equally to all citizens as an unconditional and inalienable inheritance and to retailers enabling them to charge lower prices at point of sale, i.e., to establish Compensated Prices determined by the national ratio of consumption to production for each chosen accountancy period. This would balance the price-system--something which all current proposals fail utterly to address.
In this way all goods could be accessed without debt by the consumer, the producer would be able to recover all costs of production, pay off his running bank loan and we could forget about the irrational policy of trying to promote full employment. The results would be increasing freedom, abundance and leisure. The purpose of a rational economy is not to create work, but rather to produce required or desired goods and services for humans with maximum efficiency and minimal inconvenience to all.
In the modern world, money is simply accountancy and to speak of a shortage of money is as foolish as to speak of a shortage of miles, pounds, centimetres or meters, etc.
Robots, machines, and computers are doing all the work. Years ago most people worked on farm. Now there are 64 million of us and hardly anyone works the land. Modern technology provides plenty of food. Conservatism may have worked in the olden days.
ReplyDeleteThe Romans were capitalists who looted everything. The human raced survived it. Mankind managed to survive despite conservative values or war, plunder, racism, bigotry, and looting.
Maybe when the starving Vikings invaded and stole everything it helped the human race to survive, a little bit.
Capitalism was built on slavery.
But nowadays we can blow the world to smithereens thousands of times over, and we have the machines doing most of the work. 3D printing may end millions more jobs. This will cause massive unemployment.
Whoever you are, you might find yourself poor without work one day one day. They even have software that can do psychotherapy, where every conceivable problem can have binary written solutions.
In the modern world conservatism is becoming prehistoric. Our survival is dependant on thinking out of the box. A Basic Income is one solution. If that doesn't work we will have to try something else.
It says in the Lord's prayer...."Give us this day our daily bread."
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, that is exactly what happened when Jesus multiplied and distributed loaves and fishes to his flock merely because of their need--when he referred to the "Lilies of the Field", the "Beasts of the Field", the "Fowl of the Air" and the "Fishes of the Sea", saying "They toil not.......... etc." The present financial-economic system insists that all production must be earned. This is properly called a do ut des ("this for that") system which is diametrically opposed to the Christian principle of Salvation through Grace--the latter being of the nature of a Divine Gift. The error, and the sacrilege, is, of course, in the colossal delusion and false claim that all wealth is created by human effort, whereas today human energy is little more than a catalyst in the creation of real wealth.
DeleteThe primary element in modern production is the enormous efficiency which we enjoy as heirs to a long historical string of unearned increments of association comprising a vast Cultural Heritage which enables our stupendous productivity and which belongs to all of Society.
Social Credit has both philosophical and empirical scientific grounds for demanding that the long-standing rigid Puritanical bond between work and income must be broken. Every citizen is entitled to an inheritance regardless of whether he or she may be working for financial remuneration--in addition to any income which may or may not be earned. Every organism is entitled by natural law to draw sustenance from its environment merely by virtue of its existence.
By means of its advocacy for an unconditional and equal National (Consumer) Dividend for all citizens and the institution of Compensated (Retail) Prices, Social Credit gives organic substance to the Christian message of Unearned Grace and promise of Abundance. In so doing, it rescues the Christian message from ineffectual and irrelevant transcendency to become an imminent organic influence in the lives of mankind. Social Credit, in theological and practical terms, "gives Flesh to the Word".
www.socred.org
http://social-credit.blogspot.ca
Even before the marvels of our cumulative cultural heritage, there are the boundless GIFTS we have in our natural environment: radiation from the sun giving light and warmth, plants making the oxygen that allows us to breathe and derive the benefits of combustion, the "impulse" in seeds to turn into plants we can eat and use for shelter, etc. The list is endless. The people who aspire to control us direct our attention away from these evidences of Grace, none of which people have caused, and peddle the insanely hubristic claim that human effort is the source of all wealth.
DeleteThe Moscow Times — More Than Half of Russians Want New Soviet State - Poll
ReplyDeletehttp://www.themoscowtimes.com/mobile/news/article/more-than-half-of-russians-want-new-soviet-state---poll/566745.html
Extract:
More than half of Russians would like to see the restoration of the Soviet Union, according to a poll released Tuesday.
Although 58 percent of respondents said they would like to see a new socialist system, only 14 percent believed that it was likely to happen, the report by the independent Levada center pollster revealed.
Thirty-one percent of respondents were opposed to restoring the Soviet Union, while 10 percent did not give an opinion.
The numbers show little change from a similar poll conducted a decade ago, the pollster reported.
The number of Russians who regret the collapse of the Soviet Union — currently 56 percent — remains below the all-time high in 2000 when President Vladimir Putin came to power. At the time, some 75 percent of Russians regretted the fall of the Soviet Union, according to Levada Center polls.
Just over half of Russians, or 51 percent, think the Soviet collapse could have been avoided, while another 33 percent believe it was inevitable, the latest poll indicated. In March 2000, the numbers stood at 62 percent and 26 percent, respectively