Nobody should starve. Nobody should be homeless. Nobody should have to sell their soul for a buck. People shouldn't be forced to call other people at dinner time to sell them subscriptions to the "National Post."
People who make $45,000 a year really ought to shut-the-fuck up about "people who don't want to work" being able to obtain the basic necessities of life. If we lived in a world where everyone HAD to work so that society would survive, if we were in a world where the surplus harvest was so small as to require intensive effort from all, then they might have a point. But right now, we make more crap than we need. Indeed, we make more crap than most people can afford. And all of this junk doesn't make us happy and it's destroying the planet.
A Guaranteed Annual Income for everybody on the planet earth would go a long way to ending the population time-bomb in those countries where having five or six surviving adult children is their version of a national pension plan. A guaranteed annual income in Canada would bring a measure of social stability and give people the opportunity to plan and to contribute to the quality of life through better thought-out human services.
The system we live in now is based on the results of unjustifiable social inequality of previous feudal systems, combined with the perpetuation of this anti-human inequality and the expropriation of the minimum economic rights the majority (the poor) had under feudalism.
It's a sick system and we have to get to the root of the problem immediately.
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6 comments:
Great essay! here's a link for people who want some background on the guaranteed annual income or, as more people are calling it, guaranteed livable income, since, technically an "annual" income would not necessarily be livable, it could be a $1 a year.
Livable Income For Everyone
www.livableincome.org
Glad you liked it and thanks for the link.
Point taken about using "livable" instead of "annual."
Look at the results from the guaranteed annual income experiment undertaken in Dauphin, Manitoba from 1974-1978 we can see that employment did not decline, birth rates went down NOT up, health outcomes improved, crime levels declined.etc..The political right opposes this for the usual "bums on welfare" reasons and the left hates anything which undercuts the employment prospects of social workers.
thanks for the info on that study.
BTW: This particular leftist wouldn't block a GAI simply to preserve the jobs of social workers.
But I recall there was a US study which recommended not implementing a GAI for the very reason of social workers' jobs.
I tend to think we could better use most of those people counselling abuse victims, drug addicts, and etc.
What I'm tying to say is that the political left has been largely dominated by polisc/psychology types who feel they have a right to "help" the underclass ... mostly to remain the underclass.
That's certainly not been my experience.
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