Dacia Iluministă

The village with two employers:

Here is a parable that demonstrates how basic income works.

Imagine that you live in a small medieval village. You have just moved into the village a few days ago, and you don’t have a job yet. Living there costs approximately 10 gold coins per day. You’re running out of money, so you decide to get a job. There are two employers in the village and the first one is a nasty baron. All his employees are forced to do everything he orders them to do, because if they don’t, he’ll fire them on the spot. However, as long as they serve him, he’ll pay them 20 gold coins a day, and provide housing to them. But if they decide not to serve him, he simply kicks them out onto the streets.

The second employer is a benevolent lord. His employees are always given a choice whether to serve him or not. Those who decide to serve him are paid 20 gold coins a day, and he provides housing to them. Those who decide not to serve him get 10 gold coins a day, and to them too he provides housing. The reason for this arrangement is that he believes every human being has a right to receive something he calls “basic income”, which ensures that your basic needs are always taken care of, no matter what the circumstances.

Now, which one of these two employers will you choose to serve? The nasty baron? You must be joking. Everyone in that village would of course want to serve the benevolent lord rather than the nasty baron. Okay, so you decide to offer your services to the benevolent lord first. It turns out that it’s your lucky day, one of his employees had just moved away, so there’s one vacant spot. After a short interview, the benevolent lord decides to hire you. Then he tells you the rules of the house, which you already knew, since almost everyone you had met in the village had told you how good this man was.

Okay, so now you’re faced with those two options. You can either decide to serve this man, and receive 20 gold coins a day plus housing from him. Or you can decide not to serve him, and receive 10 gold coins a day plus housing from him. So what will it be? Would you feel motivated to serve him, knowing how generous and good he is? Or would you rather start abusing him by becoming a freeloader? Which option feels more “right”? If you had any self-respect, you would choose to serve him. Doing otherwise would mean that you’re just a lazy bum. You would of course be allowed to become a freeloader, but how long could your conscience take it? All the other employees most likely decided to serve the lord too, so you would immediately stand out from the crowd, should you choose to just “hang around”. Therefore most likely you too would decide to serve your benefactor.

This parable shows us why basic income works. You see, there is a law of nature, which goes like this: “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

All intelligent beings obey this rule. To disobey equals madness. If you decide to bite the hand that feeds you then you’ll be left without food, and this decreases your chances of survival. In our parable, choosing not to serve the benevolent lord equals biting his hand. One freeloader alone couldn’t of course ruin his economy, but should enough of his employees become freeloaders, then he would become bankrupt. This in turn would mean that every villager now has only one option left: they must accept the nasty baron as their master. Where is the difference, you might now ask. Both guys pay you 20 gold coins, right? The difference is this: under the benevolent lord you had a guaranteed, unconditional income waiting for you, should you become unable to work for some reason. Under the nasty baron, you have no safety nets at all. Should you become unable to work while serving him, you’ll just be fired and left with nothing. So all those who decided to serve the benevolent lord, had a good reason to do so. By serving him they maintained a “system”, that genuinely cared for them. If they wouldn’t serve him, that system would be destroyed, and replaced with the nasty barons system, which treats them inhumanely. Their motivation to serve the good lord could be defined as “joy of service”, because they are happy to serve a master that serves them back.

In short, in a basic income society the people want to make sure that it stays intact. They know that if they don’t contribute enough, it’s all over and the old system based on slavery will return. And also, if someone cares about you unconditionally then your instincts tell you to show similar care towards that person. So here you have the reason why basic income won’t create a “lazy society”. In fact, motivation to work will be higher than in our current society. Just think it through for yourselves. Which one of these two reasons would you choose as your prime motivator: “forced to work” or “joy of service”? The answer should be obvious.

Now imagine that the people hold elections in that village, to decide which one of those two employers should be the supreme leader of the village. Who do you think would win? Only an insane person would vote for the nasty baron. So they elect the benevolent lord as their leader with a unanimous decision. Now the benevolent lord controls the village and all of its businesses and resources. Soon he decides to implement his basic income system on a larger scale. Every citizen in that town will now receive 10 gold coins per day as an unconditional basic income, which is enough to cover their basic needs. And again, there is no work requirement; you get 10 gold coins for just being a citizen. However, if people decide to do work then they will receive 20 gold coins per day.

Now every citizen in that village is facing these two options: they can choose to contribute to the community that cares for them, or they can choose not to, and just hang around with their daily 10 gold coins. Would the decision be any different from the previous one? Once again, the same instinct would kick in: don’t bite the hand that feeds. Everyone knows that if they don’t contribute enough, their utopian system will crash and it will be replaced with the old one. Therefore most villagers would definitely choose to contribute.

Then imagine that one day their wise leader announces to them that he plans to implement a 100% inheritance tax. This law would guarantee that everyone will have equal starting positions in life, no matter what their surname is, and also all super rich family dynasties, like that of the nasty baron, will be destroyed. Also, this tax would ensure that the basic income system will have enough funding in the future, and everyone would get free education and free healthcare too. Then the citizens are allowed to vote on the issue. Again, who in their right mind would vote against it? The nasty baron and his friends perhaps. But all ordinary citizens would definitely vote for this tax to be implemented. The nasty baron would be destroyed at last, and the society would be even better than what it was before.

But let’s go backwards in time a little bit. Imagine the village election again. What if the nasty baron had somehow won, through a fixed election perhaps? In that case the village would be led in the same way as our current society. Everyone is forced to contribute, because if they don’t, they’ll lose their only decent source of income and their lives would basically end there. Most villagers would therefore choose to contribute, but there would also be many who would try to do their best to avoid serving the nasty baron. As a result, there would be crime, tax evasion, gambling and general laziness. Everyone would just drag along because they’re forced to, but there would be no real motivation behind their actions.

After a few months in the office, the nasty baron finds out that some of his people are planning to overthrow him. He then asks his advisor why it’s so, and the advisor answers: “Because many villagers are extremely poor, crime rates are high, and nobody really wants to serve you, because they think you’re a cruel dictator”. The baron then asks his advisor what to do. And the advisor replies: “Create a welfare system of some sort, which will give something to the poor and unemployed. But make these benefits conditional, so that if someone is without a job, he must continuously seek one, and if he doesn’t, his benefits are taken away from him. Create an office that will watch after the unemployed at all times. And if they don’t seek jobs, or refuse to accept one when offered, then we’ll take their benefits away from them. In addition, there could also be a second system, which would give something to those who refuse to seek a job, because otherwise they would be left without any income, and this would cause them to turn rebels. We could call this second system “social security”. But let’s make this benefit so small, that one can barely stay alive with it. Also let’s make it so that they have to beg for it regularly. This will cause them to turn into beggars and social bums, rather than into rebels.” And after hearing this, the baron calls his advisor a genius, and quickly creates this “welfare system” he described.

And now the village has a welfare system very similar to the modern equivalent. But the people’s motivation to work is still the same as it was before the welfare system: they’re forced to do it. However, this time they won’t lose their whole income should they lose or quit their jobs. Instead they’ll immediately get another “job”, which could be described as a “job seeker”. And if they’re “fired” from this job for one reason or another, then they end up as “state sponsored beggars”, who are forced to beg in order to get their meagre income. Previously they begged on the streets, but now they have to do that in an office, which was founded by the state just for this purpose. This ensures that even the beggars stay “inside the system”, making them less likely to rebel.

This welfare system ensures that the nasty baron no longer has to worry that much about being overthrown by the people. Most poor people have lost their willingness to fight, because they now have enough money for at least food and water. And they of course know that this money comes from the state, so they’re not so sure anymore whether the current leaders really are their enemy or not. So they give up their rebellious ideas and become relatively obedient workers, hang rounds and loafers, who gradually lose all their interest in radical thinking and politics. In time, their children will inherit this attitude. The “I don’t care” generation has been born.

Imagine then that the benevolent lord appears to this new “I don’t care” generation, and started explaining how things could be so much better if his basic income system could replace the current rat race. Would they even bother to listen him? They would just think: “He talks about politics and we don’t care about that because it’s boring”. And should he mention the 100% inheritance tax as a possible solution, he would probably be stoned to death.

This is exactly where we are today. Most people are too lazy, ignorant and sedated to rise up thanks to the various welfare programs. The elite has turned welfare into a mind control method. But it doesn’t need to be like this. The tale about that village described the two ways to use welfare:

1. In the positive and liberating way as an unconditional reward.
2. In the negative and controlling way as a conditional reward.

This is why it’s important to have an unconditional basic income. If there are any conditions, the whole idea gets diluted, and we end up with the old system.

More work = more well-being?

The critics also say that the people’s work effort will decrease under a basic income system. And in this they’re right. When basic income is implemented, a small decrease in the people’s general work effort is to be expected. Because basic income gives people more free time, they’ll of course use it. This means that the people won’t be working as regularly as they now do. There would be “gaps” in the person’s work history, as they would periodically just enjoy their free time. Also, it’s expected that more people will choose “non-productive jobs”, such as becoming a writer, musician or an artist. These could be called “soft jobs”, as opposed to “hard jobs”, such as producing more consumer items to the world.

There have been some experiments and pilot projects on basic income, and in all cases work effort decreased by 1 to 5%. In the Mincome experiment conducted in Dauphin, Canada between 1974 and 1977, work effort decreased 1% by men and 3% by women. But this isn’t as horrible as it sounds. These figures simply mean that people have more free time. When you’re enjoying your free time, you don’t work, so your work effort decreases to zero. When the whole population is enjoying more free time, this can be seen as a general decrease of work effort in the statistics.

Let’s compare those figures with some other examples. Assume that you are forced to have two jobs in order to survive. Then your economic situation gets better, and you quit one of those jobs. Doing this, your work effort decreases by 50%. Here is another example: Imagine if the standard 8-hour workday were shortened by 1 hour. That would mean a 12.5% decrease in the nation’s work effort. So a few percentage points’ decrease in work effort doesn’t mean a thing. Even if it decreased by 10%, we would still have 90% remaining. The most important question here is: does more work really mean the same thing as more well-being?

Just think about what many jobs in our current system actually are about: producing, delivering and selling more stuff to the consumers. Supermarkets are full of useless junk that people buy with their fiat money. After a while, the things they bought become obsolete, causing them to discard them and buy new ones. And so the circle goes on. Is this really what brings us well-being? Making and consuming new stuff as fast as we can? What well-being is this? We are just destroying our planet with our consumer/producer mania. Do we really need new “versions” of various items every year or every month? Think about cars for example. A car model made in 2011 gets you from place “A” to place “B”. But a year 2004 model does the same thing. Or think about toothbrushes. Have you ever wondered when the perfect toothbrush will finally arrive to the market? Well, it’ll never do that because we already have it.

Toothbrushes are such simple items that you can’t really improve them from what they now are. But still we keep “inventing” the same thing all over again, and sell them as “new”. And we advertise them too like they were something amazing. Normal TV programs are halted on a regular basis so that people can see these ads. An emergency stop so that you can stare at the latest toothbrush? Give me a break. The same goes for toothpastes, not to mention everything else. Just think about how much unnecessary work we are doing in order to keep the capitalistic consumer mania going. Terrible amounts of construction, producing, transportation, advertising and selling, just to keep the insane merry-go-around spinning.

If all this unnecessary work were eliminated then we of course would have mass unemployment. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It would mean more free time to everyone. That’s what we really want, right? More free time to be with your family and friends and to do all the things you always wanted to do. This is what creates real well-being, rather than working your life away. And it’s good to remember that we’ll face mass unemployment in the future for another reason too: increasing automation. For this reason, unemployment will become commonplace. But the solution is simple: we just create a new “job” called “citizen”. Everyone gets paid for being a citizen and that’s it, problem solved.
__________

Is Basic Income compatible with Meritocracy?:

The definition of meritocracy goes like this.

1. Everyone starts from the same line. No privileges of any kind.

2. The better you perform, the higher rewards you’ll receive.

3. All important positions in society will be held by the most talented and most meritorious individuals.

It’s hard to see how an unconditional basic income would conflict with any of these. Because basic income is paid to all, rich and poor alike, and the only requirement to get it is to have a citizenship. This means that it’s not a privilege. Also, there is no conflict with the Number 2 since basic income won’t affect normal salaries in any way. Performing well still earns you higher rewards.

It has been said of meritocracy that it is not “any kind of woolly, soft, liberal, caring, sharing ideology. It is radical, tough, hard, ambitious, demanding and it has the greatest expectations of people, which they are expected to fulfil. The lazy, snivelling and inept won’t be able to hide in a meritocracy.” This statement contradicts with the idea of basic income, which could be defined as “unconditional caring and sharing”. But it all depends on how one defines meritocracy itself. It can be seen a hard ideology, which despises all those who are lazy or without talent. Or it can be seen as a more “soft” ideology, which while expecting a lot from you, will still care about you if you fail to meet these expectations.

It’s our task to decide what meritocracy will mean, and what kind of a future we want to build for ourselves. Communism failed because it was too “sharing”; everyone got the same rewards, no matter how much they contributed. Similarly, meritocracy could fail if it starts to overemphasize merit and talent, rendering all those without these qualities as second-class citizens, who are then left with nothing. Therefore, it’s important to include the “caring factor” in meritocracy; otherwise it will be unable to bring salvation to the world.

I see meritocracy and basic income as a perfect pair, which complete each other. Together they ensure that our message will be heard by the masses. Money is the thing the people want most. If we promise to give them just that in the form of unconditional basic income then the masses will hear all the other things too what we have to say. Most people reject outright concepts such as 100% inheritance tax and the nationalization of all privately owned businesses because they don’t see how these things would benefit them at all. They suspect that this would mean a dictatorship of some sorts. But if you say to them that this is to ensure that each citizen will get 1000 dollars or euros per month as an unconditional basic income then they’ll accept our message more easily.

Quite frankly, the masses don’t want to study the teachings of Nietzsche or Hegel or hear scientific theories about the nature of the universe. Instead, they want money. Money is their prime motivator, so we should concentrate our efforts on it. Imagine huge crowds holding up signs with the red M-logo in them and shouting time after time: “We want money! We want money!” What an exciting vision! And it can be transformed into a reality. It has been truthfully said that the people can be bought, so let’s buy them.

Summary:

To sum it up, unconditional basic income ensures the following:

– No poverty.

– Reduced crime rates, less homelessness, less prostitution, etc.

– Less alcoholism and less drug use.

– Allows people to develop independently and autonomously.

– More free time and less stress: increased psychological well-being.

– Increased work motivation.

– More sensible labour markets and more jobs.

– Employees will have more power, so employers must provide good working conditions and sensible jobs.

– Government saves money in many areas, such as in crime fighting and maintaining prisons.

– Less bureaucracy.

So vote for the unconditional Basic Income and Meritocracy! Want more money? Join the Movement!

“We want money.”
__________

5/8