This cancelling the theft of fossil fuel subsides and applying funds to a Basic Income is something Professor Guy Standing has brought up at Davos and the world economic forums. Why? In order to inspire it apparently helps to answer the question of "why?" From my perspective the pie slicing has been seriously broken for 5 decades and denial over this is yielding to along over due fight over contribution and the need for a huge correction to distribution. Status is in the process of being adjusted. Right now rent seekers are using their property to convert everyone else into property. Its been clear for a while that the sun provides the energy and the machines do the work and this has left us with a political question over a claim on power and pie slicing based on historical contribution or alternatively, if we allow it rent seeking may prevail with settling this question with a simple might-makes-right, finders keepers type of royalist answer in slavery on behalf of rent seekers. There is no way to continue to be in denial about the comparative social utility of incomes and no way to continue to insist that the market is an adequate sorting mechanism (in never was) as allowing this is tantamount to selling people's lives to rent seekers. The question for current societies is: has the core contribution to this point been made by a class of whip crackers and their offspring or has been made through the sacrifices of ordinary people through their blood sweat and tears, through the innovation of ordinary people abstracted (misappropriated) to rent seeking? Was there an actual contribution from the whip cracking class or was the impact a net negative? It seems at this point the proper framing of the issue is to say the contribution was net negative and any actual contribution was paid off long ago through allowing the whip cracker's extraction of unearned income in the form of rents and other generally ill-gotten gains. The most charitable take has the whip crackers as stewards of the wealth of others and hence their present claim of ownership based defacto political control over the fruits of society isn't even a secondary claim and it no longer holds any legitimacy as the prior or primary claim of the actual citizenry is being asserted by the citizenry as the actual generators of the wealth and the true recipients of the fruits of society. Society exits for the sake of society not for the sake of business or rent seeking or furthering injustice and inequity. The issue seems to be one of psychological or political autonomy. It may be expressed as a need to be free of exploitation which translates into practical liberty or autonomy. In practice it takes the form of a "right to be idle" which the rent seekers have had through the use of tax or rather money as a tax (a private tax) and hence their concern about the masses being able to vote themselves a share of the wealth or the masses being free of exploitation by money. So in essence rent seekers seek a right to exploit or seek slavery and slavery is tantamount to defacto murder or mass murder as these are lives forfeit, development stunted in a protracted state of agony across the span of a life- its cannibalism through time where the time is sucked out of lives. Whereas others (people not bent on rent seeking) are simply seeking the right to be free from enclosing rent seeking or a right to be idle or the same right that has been afforded to rent seekers by way of rents and excuses about property when that idleness was based on stolen time and exploitation. The power of rent seeking has come through the enclosure of time, speech, tax and education such that general human development is foreclosed upon. Covering the theft at the core of such a society necessitates a culture of dishonesty, secrecy and censorship. Its a society that runs on fear. The sponsoring (bribing) of media has been used to capture law. People have been reduced to unconsciousness and learned helplessness. Also, instead of voucherizing money to reduce it to a means of exchange its used as a means of control enhanced through reducing wages and cultivating debt, usury and gambling along with pegging to the artificial scarcity inducing economics of petrol- all of this to prop up defunct capital to further rent seeking. We're going to need a supported right to be idle (universal, high indexed guaranteed (unconditional) cradle to grave annual income derived from taxing rents) to cut the strings of rent seeking and stop the criminalization of ordinary people- ending the conversion of society into a for-profit prison with chains made of debt and money strings and reverse the notion that society is for the sake of business. We'll need an open collaborative commons of the digital sort and an unsponsored, secure means of communication, e.g. a server-less end user controlled-owned global networks. Certainly need fully green economy and more green diet as part of string cutting and breaking the yoke of rent seeking. Also for universality of the GAI, it will go to everyone but be clawed back in tax from the wealthy. Before language and tools males apparently worked about 4 hours a day, now in the present day US even in the face of the good things we have and in the face of displacing tech like self-driving cars (and Q-AI,) single parents have become more the norm and often they are working a couple jobs and paying a similarly situated stranger to raise their children where again the stranger is in the same boat with no safety net. In the face of this type of reality and loss of social mobility there is all hypocritical talk of concern for 'job creators' and an insane supply side focus when back to the days of the homestead in this country it has been about wage slavery. And so many of the things we wanted economically and even politically we had in the 3 golden decades after WWII and prior to about 1970 but have since lost due to a simple criminal political ideology known as conservatism. We've suffered a radical loss of quality of life, standard of living and security- society has been stolen by projecting 'elite' non contributors. In a society where there is anyone that is hungry we surely cannot afford the average rent seeking billionaire. So here is your blue collar majority argument (a bit ahistorical given the native experience...): Who built this country? Who does it belong too? Who more than owns it? Whose, blood, sweat and tears were sacrificed to keep it alive. Whose innovation propelled it forward. You? Your, brothers, and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and grand fathers? Who else? And haven't you given everything you could and everything you knew how? And now you have people trying to treat you and your family and your children as if you are guests in your own country, in your own society acting like you've been exiled in-place and aren't a citizen and have no claim on anything as if you don't count and have no right to the fruit of your labors or the fruit of the endless labors your parents and grand parents left you as an inheritance and worked specifically for you to have. No, your claim is total. And the these rent seekers with income that was unearned or taken from you or your families who tell you that although you financed the McDonalds and did all the work in it and ate all the food which made you sick and even physically constructed the building- that you must now leave because they own it and its being turned into a vending machine and you are let go- well, we tear up their franchise contract and take back what belongs to us for their non-contribution and our prior contributions and our status as the actual land lord, the ones to whom all gain is ultimately accrued and to whom all gain ultimately must revert and we evict these long ago paid off would- be rent seekers. It may well be that Western culture's primary relationship or existential relationship seems to express in work but it's supposed to be about friendship as opposed to servitude. So again, everyone should have a high indexed GAI from birth to death. Three questions. 1. Did the wealthy earn the right to be idle (right not to work.) 2. Do the wealthy work? 3. Do the wealthy have to work? This right to be idle as a precondition of society should extend to everyone immediately- its something that is partly addressed in the UDHR. Given automation we are in a post work age and have been for decades now. With the necessity gone from work it no longer has dignity or security- this is especially true for compulsory work. If we have the poor and the hungry we certainly cannot afford billionaires. The means of everyone's contribution should be voluntary just as it is for the wealthy, the theft based farce needs to end. You can see the US as a microcosm on this. Trying to force regressive judge who isn't representative into a life term on a supreme court that insanely writes law. Having a high end slum lord that can't produce his taxes but was in the business of charging rents to rent seekers in the top figurehead position. Where his whole policy is around protecting the poison petrol rent seeking and having that figure head laughed at the security counsel.. Rent seekers and rent seeking is being demoted.
