Basic Income Blues

The basic problem with the way the concept is discussed

Somebody who follows me thought I was somebody active in the Basic income movement in North America. I have indeed been interested in the Basic Income concept for a long time. Find an account of my long relationship to the concept here.

However, I have increasingly less interest in the Basic Income movement, as I have discussed here. The last ‘congress’ of Basic Income Canada Network BICN, which I attended, was in Hamilton in 2018. I was not well, so I did not stay for all of it.

I have tried attending some of these electronically, but alas, unsatisfactorally. The problem with doing something like that is that it needs to be taken seriously by the organizers, not just as a sop to people too broke or covid cautious to attend. It has to be managed by technically competent people.

This person wondered if I would be going to the Basic Income Guarantee BIG congress in San Francisco this July. If so, could I send her my notes about it? No, I would not be venturing into the infectious disease capital of the world, the excited states of America, for something like that. That is even if I had money to spare to do it, and felt like renewing my passport.

I recall attending the BICN congress in Montreal in 2014. I created an extensive set of notes for that, for the sessions I thought were important. I sent it to a few people who had asked for it.

Some of them ungratefully complained that I did not cover everything, or the sessions they were interested in. I did not share their ideas about which sessions, and which subjects, were important. Most of them had never attended any of these events themselves, and were not cognizent of the unfortunate way most of these congresses are organized.

There are almost always way too many sessions crammed into way too little time. Many of them are very similar to each other. Few have anything new to add to the discussion of BI.

It is always frustrating when you have two sessions you really would have wanted to attend, and they are run congruently. And these congresses are exhausting. Sometimes they start everything at seven o’clock and go into the evening. They are often two hour sessions with no breaks, then about ten minutes between sessions, like we all have superhuman attention and endurance.

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Nonetheless, I briefly considered taking Via Rail up to Ottawa to attend this years BICN congress. Then I looked at the initial schedule and dropped the idea. There was only one session which would have interested me; the ethics of continuing Basic Income experiments.

It does not seem that these sessions will ever be put up on the net, or were recorded at all. Not that they would have been really valuable or interesting. The discussion of BI never seems to really evolve, only become more arcane and repetitive, a real case of ideological incest.

The only part of this session which was immediately available to me was the BICN annual general meeting at the end. This was inane but revealing. The usual BICN cadre were there, headed by Shiela Regehr.

They still have not learned how a proper board meeting is run, according any form of rules of order. They even had trouble getting their microphones to work.

It was hard to see who else was there. I thought I saw a rather old looking Karl Wiederquist on the edge of the shot, but I am not sure. Josephine Grey has been around the BI movement in Toronto since forever.

Grey is one of these perpetual nuisances who impair any form of independent political organizing in Toronto and everywhere. It seems someone has decided she is the nexus for anything to do with a BI in Toronto. Any time anything is attempted, she shows up, somehow takes it over, and then it fizzles out.

She seems to be responsible for Ontario Basic Income Network being constantly relaunched and then falling apart again. She finally got herself a spot on the BICN board due to a lack of candidates.

This organization has been around for fifteen years now and still only has a budget in five figures. It publishes no statistics on membership. That it has trouble filling all its board spots says much about the basic viability of BICN, as it would with any such organization.

At least this bunch has progressed to holding open meetings, where those putting their donations into the organization can see who is running it and what they are doing with the funds. I understand they are now legally incorporated. There is some pretence of democratic election of a board.

I was present at the second refounding of this group in Toronto in 2012. At that time a few very nasty and aggressive people, mostly from academia, were very hostile to any idea of incorporation or of creating a budget. This has mentality impaired the organization up to the present time.

At the Winnipeg 2016 congress, many people were unimpressed by the deficiencies in the planning and execution of the congress. But what really annoyed people was the apparent cancelation of an open general meeting. Regehr and her cronies merely threw over  their shoulders an announcement of the board composition for the next two years as they ran for the airport.

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So that is the state of BICN as of 2024. I was unable to detect the presence of Floyd Morinescu, who in recent years has been a huge  internet presence in Canada regarding BI. He was not on camera. If he was given a session in the congress, I failed to spot it in the schedule.

Maybe he was in the lobby, trying to get paid subscribers to his ideas about property taxes. It is likely the Georgists and Social Crediters were there. The field is getting crowded for those trying to make money off these land tax ideas.

Last fall, I attended a forum in Toronto in which Marinescu debated with the BICN crowd. He really defeated himself, especially on a question I submitted, about BI and employment. Not many people, including BI followers, will buy the idea that people should merely accept technological unemployment, and go off somewhere and be ‘artists’.

But the state of the BI movement, everywhere in the western world, is that it is a mere “beautiful idea” cult. There is no organization which can take the idea forward. This is sad, but unsurprising considering whose interests would be threatened by a real Basic Income.

There is a growing public interest in the idea of a BI. The global BI network, plus the various charlatans who have also latched onto the idea, misinterpret this as interest in, and support for, them. BI is really still an orphan concept.

The public everywhere finds the idea of a BI appealing. However, they are waiting for it to be developed and articulated in a proper way. They are not going to accept being told they are all going to be made unemployed and will live solely off a BI.

It must be BI plus employment income, plus constantly shrinking living costs, in conditions of full employment. This is what a BI should produce when done right. The job of a proper BI movement must be to create the research institutions which can develop such a program.

The present BI movement has no interest in doing this. They seem to be looking for ways to create emotional buy in for the concept, without ever discussing anything substantial. They will create these sketchpad ‘economic plans’ for funding a BI, which clearly would not survive contact with reality.

We get from them these endless psuedo academic papers; UBI and gender Equality, UBI and Green Economy, UBI and housing, UBI and cures for baldness. It is whatever the current hot issue is, usually tied to ‘woke’ culture. It makes UBI look like a scam, something someone is trying to put over on the public.

The sad truth is that, in a way, it is a scam. Ever since I have advocated for a BI, I have cautioned that there is a good side to this and a bad side. It could free people, or it could be used to enslave people.

Ever since I have been talking about BI, I have been dismissed by both critics of, and true believers in, a UBI. Believers just blank me out when I try to show them the dark side. Most critics just cannot fit the concept into their existing economic dogmas, from socialism through to ‘Laissez Laire”.

What encourages me are the good kinds of critics. These are the ones who recognize that the world will eventually have to go to some form of BI. However, it totally conflicts with capitalism.

Of course, any kind of socialism or real democracy conflicts with capitalism. Eventually capitalism has to be eliminated. Then it will be possible to reorganize the economy and society in a way that would facilitate a BI.

A BI is the perfect starting point to working out how a post capitalist, meaning socialist, economy would work. This is why we need to develop think tanks and full blown institutions which can study how a Social Basic Income economy would work. However, most advocacy for socialism is impaired by the idea that we should not do that, it is ‘predicting the future’. We are supposed to overthrow capitalism and then work it all out from there, as we go.

Very few people are trying to carry out a disciplined study of BI economics. One is Jurgen De Wispaleare, who I follow closely. There are some developments in this direction outside the Atlantic world but they are harder to find out about.

De Wispaleare has written a lot about the practical aspects of organizing a BI. He has helped to run many of these experiments. Recently he became discouraged about the UBI movement; it is full of dreamers, who were not paying attention to the work of people like him.

The present head of Basic Income Earth Network, Sarath Davala of India, encouraged Jurgen to stay involved and to become the BIEN director of research. It seems they are in agreement that the movement needs to turn from philosophy into political economy.

Now Jurgen has cofounded the Fribis institute for the study of Basic Income, at the university of Frieburg in Germany. We shall see if this will develop into what is needed.

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The present UBI movement needs to be sharply criticized but in a constructive way. The dreamers need to be told to go soak their heads. The dark side of the movement needs to be called out, and more about them below.

UBI needs to develop into a political economic research organization, staffed by people with the background to be able to do the work, and to publicize their research in a proper way. It needs to develop a funding source that enables it to work without being coopted by the wrong influences. It needs a governance structure which insures that people who are in alignment with the right aims of a Basic Income are always directing it.

The usual grenade thrown into any discussion of how a post capitalist economy would work, and how to shift to it, is the idea that every country has a different system. Actually, due to the dominance of global capitalism, most of the developed countries are run in about the same way. What works and is true for one, usually carries over into the others.

UBI cannot be merely started up like you were launching a new social program. The chatter about funding a UBI is the stupidest aspect of discussion about it. A UBI would be funded the same way everything else would be funded in a post capitalist economy; by the government’s power to issue the currency.

To talk about this is, of course, to talk about a complete change in the money system. It goes from private banks to a system of public credit, with the money being issued by a public treasury. It ends with taxes going from funding government mostly by taxing work, to wealth taxes as a means of removing money from circulation once it has done its work, preventing accumulation of private wealth.

The most encouraging thing about these times is that these kinds of ideas are starting to be taken up and toyed with by the more intelligent public. What is still missing is the institutions which can integrate these ideas into a complete system of political economy. Then, a coherent political movement has to be built around them.

To repeat, the present UBI movement in the Atlanticist countries are really not up to this job. I say nothing here about BI organizations outside the Atlantisphere.

Basic Income Earth Network BIEN, the originator of the second wave of interest in income guarantees, now seems to be moving in this productive direction. This seems to be due to influences from outside the Atlanticist countries. The North American movements, United States Basic Income Guarantee USBIG and especially BICN, remain flaky.

The worst of it is they have largely turned to the dark side. People associated to them keep talking about ‘freeing people from work’ or paying people ‘dividends’, or even moving unemployed people to special zones where they can live on a cheaper BI. Those who cannot see what actual working people are going to make of this, really should not be setting themselves up as UBI advocates and need to be discouraged in every possible way.

That is, of course, what the dark side of a BI is all about. This is why all the Billionaires and ‘CEOs’, the financial capitalist think tanks, are getting so interested in a UBI. When used their way, it is the perfect tool to manage and control a surplus population, a ‘technopeasantry’ which they no longer have a use for and which they would like to dissapear.

At best, the CEOs version of UBI is a cheap fix for a failing economic system. It can keep consumer demand up and prevent total disorder for awhile longer. It delays the necessity for economic reform which will end the era of the present oligarchy.

The worst thing about the inadequacy of groups like BICN is that it creates a vacuum. The public wants information about new ideas such as BI but BICN offers only chatter. Into this vacuum flows the charlatans, looking to get money flowing to them by pimping the BI concept.

Santens is the number one charlatan in North America. He has a talent for tagging onto every idea or trend in economic reform and connecting it to UBI, but without any real understanding or integration. Morinescu wants to be the Santens of Canada.

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These are my blues about the state of the Basic Income idea from Canada. My song is sung.

In future, as I inform myself fully, think it through fully, and have the time to sit and write, I will come out with postings on aspects related to a UBI. Included will be;

The comprehensive economic reform which will be required to implement a viable UBI.

The relation between political reform and revolution, and these economic reforms.

The limitations of the Land Value Tax, currently trendy among UBI people. An introduction to the idea of a Rebated Land Use Tax as a better way fund local government and regulate land use.