Image from Peterborough ExaminerThe world-wide collapsing economies and collapsing ecosystems together create such a catastrophic storm that all versions of buttoning down the hatches and weathering it out simply won’t work. The history of economy has been to tear at the earth until life itself cannot be sustained. The western addiction to profit at any cost has opened the floodgates to massive inequality, poverty and starvation across the globe.
The solution? — a global guaranteed income for all, what some social pioneers are calling a universal basic income (UBI). Oh! but who are these people kidding but themselves. Have they forgot that over-population worldwide kills this baby in the crib?
Contrary to belief, one of the first things people do when they have money is to control their family size. Yes, there will continue to be people who will want to be fruitful and over-multiply, but the number of concerned people is so great that a population reduction would immediately begin. At the Institute for Food and Development Policy, Frances Moore Lappé and Rachel Schurman reveal how “poverty is the TNT in the population bomb.” So don’t panic that 7.7 billion suddenly-fed mouths will automatically lead to another 7 billion mouths to feed.
Let’s create a model for a guaranteed income, then discuss background pros and cons. I will use U.S. economic numbers. Every other country can produce its own currency and guaranteed income using this design, creating in totality a world free of poverty and want.
For this model, we’ll use the productive sum total of the entire economy. As context, it started with the industrial revolution. Manual labor began moving from farming into factories of manufacturing. In the year 1760 Britain compiled the total production of manufacturing into a number called the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In recent times, the GDP was changed to the Gross National Product (GNP).
The latest finalized number for the GNP for the U.S. is for the year 2018 at $20.18 trillion, according to the World Bank. The number of adults over the age of 18 in the U.S. is 209,128,094. If we divide the GNP by the number of adults, we get 99,651.84. This reflects an equal share for all adults of the GNP.
What is to stop us from issuing currency to each adult for the amount of $99,651.84 for the year 2018. Then we add a new differently designed currency again for 2019, the amount depending on the GNP. Let’s add three more years, making it a 5-star economy. So, what happens on the sixth year? The 2018 currency value collapses to zero and a new currency is made in its place. From then on, every year, one currency dies while another one is born. The 2018 currency collapses in 2023. The 2019 currency collapses in 2024, and so on; but a new currency replaces it; it’s just that simple. A perpetual economy is born. Rather than a paltry poverty-level UBI, we create a GNP-shared income (GNP-SI).
Since the Covid-19 disruption has had such a devastating effect on the economy, we can position a second option of using the 2018 GNP for each year of the 2018-2022 five-year rotation, unless unforeseen events snap back the economy to its normal yearly increase. The practical result is nearly the same. Multiplying the 2018 $20.18 trillion GNP by five gives us a $100.9 trillion perpetual economy.
Setting up the disbursement of cash is a straight-forward task. In the U.S., Constitutional money is gold or silver coin. Historically, silver and gold certificates have substituted for coin, which is too heavy to carry around.
The bigger job will be to update the GNP. Much of the work is done without pay and is therefore unregistered and uncounted for as part of the GNP. All service work needs to be included. So, if you have served, for instance, as a caregiver for some sick or elderly person, you should be able to walk into a government office and declare this work. A fair assessment can then be given to the work. The assessed value is then added to the aggregate GNP.
With people having enough money to follow the American dream, what opens up instantly is a vista onto a world that can now be saved from human destruction. Here are a few starters:
• People don’t have to go to work and build millions of new cars that are sending us over the cliff.
• Vast rail and shipping networks can quickly reduce our carbon footprint by leaps and bounds.
• People won’t show up to work in the morning to cut down the world’s forests for some psychopathic billionaire.
• The service work of protecting endangered species and marine sanctuaries will explode. Permaculture seaweed beds can carbon sink enormous tonnage, while creating havens in open ocean for fish and sea life to flourish.
• Plastic pollution is destroying our oceans and planet. New solutions are coming to bear. Watch the new documentary: The Story of Plastic.
• Regenerative localized farming practices can quickly replace destructive corporate land use for profit rather than bio-rich food.
• The application of biochar to the land will supercharge the quality of the global diet.
• Vast quantities of organic compost can be generated, without water, on the semi-arid deserts that constitute 40% of the world’s land surface using the agave plant and mesquite trees. See Ronnie Cummins new book: Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food and a Green New Deal.
• Geoff Lawton took permaculture (permanent agriculture) to Australia and within 3.5 years he’s turned desert into an agricultural heartland without irrigation or artificial fertilizer.
• Virginia farmer Joel Salatin demonstrates how incredibly successful and sustainable natural farming can be. He hasn’t planted a seed or purchased a chemical fertilizer in 50 years.
• Warmongers will struggle to find mercenaries. Most people would rather ‘go fishing’ than kill people. Warmongers top the list of most destructive people, killers of people and nature.
• With today’s use of artificial intelligence and robot welders doing most of the manufacturing, service work becomes open to unimagined possibilities.
The beginning of the idea of GNP-SI goes back at least to the dawn of the industrial age. Futurists proscribed a new world order, a Garden of Eden economy for the exhausted masses. Machines would do the work, while government would split the profits created by the machines amongst the populace. But something got in the way.
British royalty and a new class of industrial magnates were aghast by the ideas of sharing wealth and economic liberation. The whole notion of royal ascension to power, the prerogatives and privileges it brings, with class layers of labor would all be put at risk. To think that the toiling masses might enjoy leisure was enough to make an aristocrat choke. Written history is replete with examples of self-anointed demigods belittling what they call the unwashed masses. Feudalism was in place and no uppity futurist was going to spoil the plot.
Expect the equivalent elites of today to fight against any UBI or GNP-SI. Inequality, poverty, sickness, famine, pandemics, and death amongst the masses shall go on just as before. Old excuses and new forgeries will be evoked to prove that equality is forever impractical.
Here are a few:
UBI is inflationary and therefore not reasonable. Not really—the 5 year rotation creates a ceiling amount that endures over time, approximately $100 trillion for the U.S. As described above, money creation is rotational, circular, meaning perpetual.
The current practice of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve is inflationary. The number of dollars they create has no end in sight. The more they print, the less value the money in your pocket has. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
UBI would create a permanent lazy mass class that will only accelerate planetary destruction. Studies show that people want to help rather than sit around. When people get money, the first thing they do is get free from the grinding stagnation of poverty. Money is power. A UBI gives people the freedom to choose their own direction in life. The examples cited above are just a few ways people will respond to help save the planet for posterity. The masses will be set free to explore their creativity. The vast majority have said they want a planet that will sustain life for posterity. UBI gives them the chance to get some skin in the game.
GNP-SI is a breath-taking proposal. With such a huge shift toward sharing common wealth, old suspicions and concern about equal pay for equal work will persist. A commendable human social feature is that we love fairness. If abled persons refuse to put in effort and sacrifice for the overall economy, then why should they divvy up the profits equally with those who did put in effort and made sacrifices?
Flush with money, why would people work? Why should people continue at jobs that are for someone else’s profit, jobs that feed the over-consumption of the planet and tear at the ecosystems that are forced to absorb the shock of aggregate human behavior? Maybe opening a door to less productivity, even laziness, is a welcome feature for survival. It was certainly not welcome in the past.
When humans first lived in tribes, everyone had to pull their own weight or risk the survival of the community. Some sort of “equal” effort was imperative. Thus, we have a natural deep-seated fear of being pulled down by laziness or its equivalent by others.
This inherent fear can’t help but impinge on our ability to adjust to the new artificial world of industrialization where machinery of all kinds yield so much leverage and power over the basic challenges of survival. The levers of industrialization also brought with it new opportunity to continue ‘equality’ in the tribal effort. Industrialists were now in a position to share newly found wealth with their tribe of workers or do otherwise.
Witness to history, another age of greed took hold, preferring to perpetuate a likeness of king over subject, of master over slave, now industrial owner over worker, such that, slave wages well below the cost of living have persisted for the vast majority, which is exactly why it’s long overdue to create a GNP sharing program to adjust for the inability of greed to resolve itself, especially when care for ancient tribe and modern community have been lost.
Moreover, we must not forget that able-body persons are now, more than ever, in competition with super-body robots that can, for instance, weld auto bodies together at a record pace and with near perfect repetition. Automation is geared for profit not job creation, especially when mutual human respect is missing. Bots and advancing artificial intelligence increasingly make up the GNP work output, reducing the average citizen’s chances of entering the workforce as a meaningful participant.
Outstanding remains the question of important jobs not getting done if everyone is off living their American dream. Critical restoration is an example. Long-standing environmental damage and destruction continue because of political corruption and interference.
A case in point is the nuclear industry. Why should nuclear-related stockholders be allowed to profit from making the planet uninhabitable for posterity? If we are going to get serious about saving the planet then we have to make nuclear profiteers responsible for nuclear cleanup. This is a dirty job that needs to be done, and we the people, need to make these profiteers pay for their abuse of the planet and crime against posterity.
GEN-Z is screaming for global productive work to go towards saving the planet. A GNP-SI finally gives the masses the mobility and power to help them. Transforming the economy is essential to kick-starting many solutions begging for attention.
Another criticism will be that some countries are too poor to use GNP—wrong. If they apply fair value to all the goods and resources exported and add to that a fair value for all of the work done with and without pay, you suddenly have a GNP that will work quite well using their own currency.
To be clear, the GNP should reflect all of the work done, not just the work paid for. Many people work for free, helping friends and relatives who are too poor to pay for help. So, a vast store of work is being left out of the equation of GNP to the detriment to all. A fair assessment of all unaccounted for work should be added to the GNP to give the utmost true picture of valued human activity.
The private central banks will never give up their stranglehold on both the market and financial economies. This is the biggest challenge to any UBI proposal. Bankers seem impossible to defeat. The coronavirus is just the latest excuse to gift themselves and corporate elites with a multi-trillion dollar bailout. Trickery seems to never sleep. They manipulate the stock market with derivatives and credit default swaps, hedge funds, mortgage bubbles, and financial instruments that create toxic debt of all kinds.
They have given a nice euphemistic-sounding name to a new fraud called quantitative easing (QE). On the subject of QE, billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller stated, “This is fantastic for every rich person. This is the biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the rich ever.” Worse, many people believe that lavishing tax breaks on the rich will cause them to create employment. Druckenmiller confides that the billion dollar give-a-ways to billionaires by megabanks have not led to a trickle down of jobs.
Robbing the masses in not new in history. Kings robbed workers and slaves alike. Then came privately owned banks.
The U.S. privately owned central bank was born in 1913. It was named the Federal Reserve to deceive the public into believing it was owned federally by the people. The federal income tax was introduced the same year. The plan was to transfer wealth from the working classes to the federal government, then from the federal government to the bankers.
A GNP-SI creates a major challenge to this direct theft from workers to bankers. A GNP-SI allows the masses to break free from the mega-bank financial market manipulations. Wall street fraud needs to die on the vine and fraudsters need to go to jail.
The massive financial losses of workers world-wide due to the coronavirus is no accident. Follow the money. Working people daily lose houses to the bankers. The unipolar worldwide financial system is part of the broader project of the Wall Street financial elites to establish the contours of a world government.
Filling the world with fresh cash defeats the digital financial manipulations by the banks to create a unipolar cashless Feudal system. Now is the time to replace the elite’s plan for universal poverty with universal income. Now is the time to make our planet livable. Are you ready for a 5-star economy for all?The post Are You Ready for a Guaranteed Income for All? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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