Social Basic Income

The right way to think about a Basic Income

This article follows up on my previous post about UBI, here. You should have read that before reading this.

If I have complex ideas to get across, I try not to create one block buster post. I like to split them into more digestible chunks if possible. Also, since most people now read my stuff from the e-mail list, I do not want to exceed size limits.

In the first part I discussed what is wrong with the Basic Income movement. It was founded by philosophy professors, which means a basically liberal way of thinking. Thus they are focused on polite debate in which no one’s feelings can be hurt as long as they accept the rules of the In Group.

Thus they are incapable of developing the concept and communicating it in an effective way. They have had a lot of trouble even defining their terms and staying within them. In recent years they have lost control of the subject to well funded nefarious actors.

I have discussed these shills for the Billionaire’s version of Basic Income. For them Basic Income is about normalizing mass unemployment. The worst thing about them is that they seize on new ideas in political economy which are emerging, and distort them.

These shills use a Judas Goat technique to draw people who are interested in these ideas toward their idea of a BI. They find the parade and get in front of it. Yet these ideas, like BI itself, are building blocks for a post capitalist, post Billionaires economy.

Particularly among real socialists, this has the effect of putting people off the idea of a BI. Really, no sensible or ethical person would accept the idea that most of the population should just accept made redundant by technology.

Socialists are the only people who would put these ideas into effect, including the good idea of a BI. Thus, none of these ideas will be put into effect until a socialist revolution. Therefore, if you are sincere and sensible about wanting a BI, these are the people you must convince and bring onside.

The proper view of a BI is of full employment at a good aggregate income. The Billionaire’s Judas Goats are drumming, very hard, their neoMalthusian view of the world, of a surplus population which uses too much resources. The only way to refute them is to turn the ideas they have hijacked, back toward that proper view of BI.

The best way to refute these Judas Goats is to put these ideas right side up again. In the course of doing so one builds a vision of a BI as a key part of a social political economy. This makes it easy to show that the bullshitters do not really understand or believe in these concepts.

I focus on two ideas which are especially important to building such a political economy. So the Billionaire’s shills are especially aggressive about seizing and redirecting them. These are Modern Monetary Theory and land value taxes.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is the latest name for an old idea. During the 1960s, comporting with the actual start of the BI idea, it was called Functional Finance. It was developed at the turn of the century by German economists, who gave it the name “chartelism”.

These people wanted a better way of explaining money and economics than the old liberal economics. That is, money as a commodity or store of value. Invisible hands decided things through ‘markets’.

Liberal economics relates to the old fake arguments about funding a BI, all the nonsense written about that. Most of it is really intended to justify continuing various forms of capitalist exploitation. We are going to create land value taxes,’monetize’ resources, or create social dividends from ‘sovereign wealth’ funds out of nothing in particular.

The Chartelist economists tell us that government can issue whatever money it needs to fund its programs. Taxes are for regulating economic behavior and preventing inflation. They are also needed for the very important purpose of preventing concentration of wealth in private hands.

Of course, government can only issue as much money as there are products and services to be bought with it. The economy must be able to produce or import the goods necessary for life. This requires an industrial plan.

And of course, issuing public money requires establishing public banking, which requires eliminating, or tightly controlling, private banking. That is the essence of eliminating capitalism. So, a BI is funded the same way everything else is, by government’s sovereign power to issue the currency and take it back as taxes.

For the Canadian economy, we would need to get rid of income taxes, modify sales taxes and corporate taxes, and create a wealth tax. We do not need to tax natural resources, we need to own them outright, charging usage fees or marketing them through public corporations.

As for land taxes, that is a very interesting topic. The bad kind of BI advocates lately been drumming the Land Value Tax, (LVT). That is, instead of taxing the land plus all buildings and improvement on it, only the land is taxed.

Obviously, that is a good deal for property developers and estate managers. They do not have to pay taxes on what actually produces their revenue. It is a bad deal for local governments who need those revenues with which to provide services.

It is a very good deal for the people who can print all the money they want, so they can keep real estate bubbles inflated indefinitely. No one else can afford to build anything and they eventually own everything. That is, unless a new socialist government expropriates this land.

Land, like any resource in limited supply, should be publicly held. It should be leased out. A social government could not take all of it right away, so two systems of land tenure would exist side by side for some time.

So, we will need to tax privately held land in some way. Of course, land taxes or public fees must be about managing land use, and funding local services. Everything cannot be funded out of “ground rents’, as per the “Georgist” charlatans, who Bad BI shills often align with.

Thus it makes more sense to tax and charge steeply, for the occupancy of land. Then, to rebate according to the use made of the property. Thus, socially beneficial uses like affordable rental and ownership developments pay little for the land they are on.

Thus, one of the main drivers of living costs is kept down. Thus, a main source of rentier profits is closed off. Thus, speculation is made impractical.

Now, to briefly look at how a UBI will work as part of a social political economy. I must start with another important, but neglected, topic within BI; maximum incomes. Mandating a minimum income makes little sense without also a mandating a maximum income.

If we do not do that, the minimum will keep chasing the maximum, we will have endless inflation of living costs, and this will wreck any BI program. Now this brings us to the fundamental fallacy of labor unions, which are also usually averse to a BI. Attempting to improve living standards by raising wages merely leaves us chasing inflation.

The success of any BI program requires driving living costs down. In addition to reducing housing costs by curbing real estate speculation, it requires making government services free or cheap. Price controls may flip out free market cultists, but are the best method of keeping grocery costs down.

What matters to working people is not how much they make from work, but their total income and benefits. Keeping wages down would make more of the useful types of business viable, increasing total employment. There would be even less sense to most forms of robotization.

This, plus reductions in the work week, is the solution for the technological unemployment which bad BI advocates are so obsessed with.

My way of advocating for a UBI is to try to get people of the left onside with it. However, since a good BI cannot be done until we have real socialism, I find it more important to advocate for that first. This means I need to support real socialists.

That means, people who understand what socialism actually is, who are not really ‘welfare state’ liberals. As well, who are not old style communists, usually still arguing old Bolshevik party politics. The people who glorify Stalin and Stalinist planning methods, or else Trotsky and his ideas, both need to go away.

Modern socialism accepts the idea that an adequate living standard for everyone requires efficient productivity. Modern China is the best example in the world of a successful socialized economy. People calling themselves socialists but rejecting the Chinese model, misunderstand the point of socialism.

China is run on social productivist principles. Interestingly, it recently considered a BI and rejected it. Instead, it wants to eliminate poverty and unemployment by continuing development.

Alas, a problem with developmentalism is that it tends to ignore systems theory. Nothing can expand forever but must find an optimum state. Any system requires some redundancy or surplus energy.

A Basic Income is the way to square this basic contradiction in an industrial society. Nothing can be kept running at full capacity all the time. Yet people need a constant supply of basic goods.

Eventually, China will run into these limitations. It will take another look at a BI. As more countries transition to a socialized economy and solve their basic productivity problems, eventually one of them will attempt a BI.

Meanwhile, in Canada, as in other deindustrializing countries, the task is first to achieve that socialization. We will have to bring domestic production of basics back up to a minimal level before we can implement a BI.

This brings me to another aspect of a BI. Less developed countries will not be able to successfully implement one. It first requires being able to produce, or economically import, all basic goods.

We should not conclude from this that we should just forget about BI until after capitalism.

I have little patience with present day Marxism. They have their theories. They do not have any strategies.

If socialists are ever going to achieve the worthy goal of overthrowing capitalism, they need a clear idea of what a post capitalist world would look like. They need a slow but deliberate strategy for getting there. It must be possible for normal humans to feel that this offers them a realistic alternative to the present dystopia.

Instead, most classic Marxists or communists, or critical social theorists as they are often called now days, still have the idea that working through what a post capitalist world would look like is ‘Utopian’. These people are really useless for dealing with present day problems.

They reject the idea of BI out of hand. It cannot work under capitalism. That is true. However, the corollary is that it may work after capitalism.

I have had the idea for some time, that a good post-capitalist system would have three main components; a social system on BI lines, an economy on Chartelist lines, and a government on discursive democratic lines. Of course I have deal briefly here with a BI system, with Chartelism only as it relates to BI, and the latter concept not at all.

Of course, we are not getting these things through the present system. The billionaires must be moved out of the way. They are not going to go without a very nasty fight.

Thus, people who want the benefits which the good kind of BI could bring, will have to become the revolutionists. They will have to integrate this idea into the other elements of a post capitalist order. They will have to form a common front with other people who want these elements.

Meanwhile, the tech billionaire’s shills are getting to people first. They have plenty of funds to promote the ‘tech displacement’ view of a BI. They can abundantly fund these ‘experiments’ which do not actually prove anything but are effective propaganda.

These ‘pilots’ are based on a fallacy of composition; assuming that the whole will work the same way as a small part. The only BI experiment which will ever matter is when a BI is implemented through an entire country. Then we will see how it really works.

Much will depend on what type of government, with what economic system, tries to apply it. It could lead to inflation and breakdown. It could be turned into a system of control over the underclass, far more vicious than present welfare states.

It could be implemented by a socialist government, which can study the results and quickly adapt programs to support the BI. From this we could learn just how the income must be delivered and in what amount. We could learn how the tax system must be changed. We could learn how land use must be regulated.

To conclude, we must note that we have three basic types of BI advocates. The good kind talk about full employment at a decent standard of living.

We still have these liberal types around who talk about it as a more efficient way of delivering social welfare. It must be enough to keep people alive but not to ‘discourage work’. A variant of this kind wants a BI to subsidize junk wage employers, who can then get even cheaper labor.

All these are drowned out by the worst possible type of BI advocate. Within the North American context, at least, it is almost hopeless to try to refute them. These are the shills for the new Billionaire neoMalthusian class, supplied with the biggest of megaphones.

With these Santens and Florinescu types, I wonder if they ever sleep. They must be working with some sort of botfarm, to be able to saturate the social media in that way. They seem to gloat at every meme supporting the idea of mass technological unemployment.

So, for now, what are serious BI advocates to do? If we are stuck in the context of the Atlantisphere, it is a discouraging time. However, outside these ‘western’ countries, people are still talking about BI in terms of social justice. Robot world is not getting much traction in these countries, even the one which now makes most of the robots.

So, we lonesome leftist BI advocates in Canada will keep on keeping on, though the Santens types have poisoned discussion of BI for this generation. But at some point soon, the big turn will come. Society will be rebuilt on a social basis.

Then a point will come when the need for a BI will become evident. Then we will finally be listened to. Probably after we are dead.