Basic income

"I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene."

"There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed."

"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."

"Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation."

"An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer."

"There shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum. ... as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."

"It is proposed that the payments ... be made to every person, rich or poor ... because it is in lieu of the natural inheritance, which, as a right, belongs to every man, over and above property he may have created, or inherited from those who did."

"Is this not utopian? Of course it is, in the sense in which ... the social security system was utopian before Bismarck put together its first building blocks."

"People should receive an income without conditions attached... It's a fragment of the massive inheritance we owe to nature, to previous generations, to technological progress, to the know-how, and all these gifts which we receive from nature, and the past."

"The coming age of the machine is part of a new time, and offers unprecedented possibilities to re-design the way we live. Technological innovation will, we are told, destroy more jobs than it creates. This will liberate human beings from lives of drudgery, allowing time to explore life, be creative and collectively redefine what civilization can be. But, as Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens, makes clear, in order for everyone to benefit from these opportunities, “every citizen must be granted property rights over part of the wealth that the machines produce”. This requires a new approach to how we think about the economy and the way it operates."

"The present model – while it can boast of successes – is ill-equipped to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the time, and must go. Materialistic values are built into the system: selfishness, desire and excess promoted, and (speaking generally throughout) while philanthropy is part of some corporate strategies, presented with the choice of saving lives but losing money, administrators side with the money. Fundamental change has been needed for some time. The advance of automation adds one more imperative to the process. A new, sustainable, humane economic model is required, worthy of the 21st Century and beyond. The revolution in work requires an evolution in living: a new approach, in which the acknowledgment that humanity is One is primary. We are brothers and sisters of One humanity; the systems that govern our lives should be based on and encourage the realization ofthis fact. Sharing as a principle that animates human affairs naturally follows such an understanding and when pragmatically applied will allow everyone tolive dignified lives free from fear of poverty. Everyone is entitled to the means required to meet their needs, irrespective of whether they have a job and income or are unable to secure either…."

"A minimal guarantee with regards to income seems to me as almost inevitable."

"Since the advances in technology are going to mean fewer and fewer jobs in the market economy, the only effective way to ensure those permanently displaced by machinery share the benefits of increased productivity is to provide some kind of government-guaranteed income. ... With guaranteed income independent of their jobs, workers would be more free to set their own schedules and adapt to changing conditions. That adaptability would in turn allow greater flexibility for employers, plus many benefits for society as a whole."

"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." ... we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being."

"No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so that after his day's work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load."

"A certain small income, sufficient for necessaries, should be secured to all, whether they work or not."

"This sort of thing, is the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed."

"Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them."

"So long as you have a Congress dominated by big money, I can guarantee you that the discussion about universal basic income is going to go nowhere in a hurry."

"If we can develop a strong grassroots movement which says that every man, woman and child in this country is entitled to a minimum standard of living—is entitled to health care, is entitled to education, is entitled to housing—then we can succeed. We are living in the richest country in the history of the world, yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country and millions of people are struggling to put food on the table. It is my absolute conviction that everyone in this country deserves a minimum standard of living and we've got to go forward in the fight to make that happen."

"There must be a guarantee that people receive what they need in order to live a dignified life."

"I do [support a UBI], but that is not where we are. I think that is a very correct idea... that’s kind of a step too far right now for the United States."

"I think the fundamental issue that has to be dealt with is that technology is not a bad thing in itself. But technology cannot simply be used by the owners of the technology, it’s got to be used to benefit all of our people. So if we replace a dangerous job with a machine, that’s a good thing. That doesn’t mean you simply displace the worker and throw him or her out on the street, and that raises the question of basic income for everybody and so forth. It is an issue that has not gotten the attention it deserves, but it’s hovering in front of us and we have to deal with it."

"All the politicians want to talk about jobs. They want to say we need jobs. People don't want a "job". They want the stuff that they get because they have a job. If they can have the stuff and skip the job, most people would do that. That's why people look forward to retirement, because they don't have to work anymore. So we don't want to create jobs, we really want to eliminate jobs and create leisure."

"If one machine can cut necessary human labor by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead."

"We advocate a Universal Basic Income, received by all citizens on an unconditional basis: that is, detached from the labor market. This offers a choice between work and leisure. To offer such a choice is both a fruit of an affluent society and a solution to the problem of technological unemployment."

"As a technologist, I see the trends, and I see that automation inevitably is going to mean fewer and fewer jobs. And if we do not find a way to provide a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work, we’re going to have social unrest that could get people killed. When we have increasing production—year after year after year—some of that needs to be reinvested in society. It doesn’t need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that. I’m not a communist, a socialist or a radical. But these issues have to be addressed."

"There is no evidence whatsoever that a basic income would reduce work and labour. The evidence is strong that it would do the reverse. What we have found in the pilots is that people with basic security work more and work more productively."

"Imagine if the government provided a basic minimum income, like Richard Nixon once proposed. ... Suddenly having to quit your job would no longer be such a huge leap — there’d be a real social safety net to catch you. ... If governments really want to promote startups and the economic innovation they bring, ... they need to start rebuilding the social safety net, so that their citizens know that if they go out on a limb and try something risky, someone will be there to catch them if things don’t work out."

"The principle of an economic floor under each individual must be established. It would apply equally to every member of society and carry with it no connotation of personal inadequacy or implication that an undeserving income was being received from an overgenerous government."

"We will need to adopt the concept of an absolute constitutional right to an income."

"For perhaps the first time in history, we have the resources, the know-how and the technology to make starvation and dependency relics of the past. But do we have the will?"

"All these things God created, He put them in ... the world, without surrounding them with walls and gates, so that they would be common to all His children."

"Now what happens then when you introduce technology into production? You produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods, but at the same time you put people out of work. You can say, "Oh but it always creates more jobs. There will always be more jobs." Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption, and one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren't even beautiful. And therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working, because we believe, as good Protestants, that the devil finds work for idle hands to do."

"The basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked, that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary. And if we don't allow it to achieve its purpose, we live in a constant state of self-frustration. So then, if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force, and they have to operate on a very much diminished income (say, some sort of dole), the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does not have the wherewithal to buy his products. And therefore he has invested in this expensive automotive machinery to no purpose. And therefore obviously the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce. People say, "That's not fair. Where's the money going to come from? Who's gonna pay for it?" The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community."

"Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income. Now, you see, that absolutely horrifies most people. "Say, all these wastrels, these people who are out of a job because they're really lazy, see... ah, giving them money?" Yeah, because otherwise the machines can't work. They come to a blockage. This was the situation of the Great Depression, when here we were still, in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories... everything going. But suddenly, because of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor—starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering. It is ingenuity. You see, we are psychologically back in the 17th century, and technically in the 20th. And here comes the problem. So what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological attitude to money and to wealth, and furthermore to pleasure, and furthermore to the nature of work."

"I don’t think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. Unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society."

"Universal Basic Income is not socialism. It's capitalism where income doesn't start at zero. Markets and businesses function much better when people have money to spend. If we can all participate in the market, then markets become much better for all of us. What's bad for markets is when consumers don't have money to spend. So this is very pro-growth, pro-market, and pro-consumer. It's the next form of capitalism. It's the trickel up economy."

"If we expand the notion of work, which is something that a universal basic income would help us do, it would begin to compensate parents and caregivers; it would begin to recognize different forms of work."

"[A universal basic income] would be one of the greatest catalysts to entrepreneurship and creativity we have ever seen, and I've worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years. We have to put more Americans in position to do work that they value intrinsically, instead of as a necessary means to survival."

"If you care about children, then [UBI] is the best way to make household and families stronger; if you care about women and economic empowerment, this is a way to make it so that women can walk away from abusive or exploitative employers; if you care about communities of color, they would benefit much more proportionally from a thousand dollars a month than other communities, because they have lower access to various jobs and opportunities. This is the way that we can reform society in a way that actually serves all of our goals, our collective goals. And at least one study showed that if you would alleviate child poverty, you would increase GDP by 700 billion dollars, because of better health outcomes, educational outcomes, higher worker productivity, better mental health... We have to start investing in our people, intrinsically."

"We have to say "we are the citizens and owners and stakeholders of this society, we can vote ourselves a dividend, and it's up to us to build an economy that serves us, because right now fundamentally, this economy is not designed to serve human beings. It is designed to serve capital efficiency. And for a long time, that also served human beings, but increasingly it's going to be that having lots of humans working for a company is irrelevant, or even negative, for corporate success. And we can see this by the fact that 94% of the new jobs created since 2005 to 2015, were gig economy, temp and contractor jobs, because the employer said "you know what? I'd rather not have a full-time employee, I'd rather not pay health care benefits", and that's why so many Americans right now are in that position. So we have to start recognizing that the economy is changing for good, and that it's up to us, the citizens of this country, to rewrite the rules the economy to serve us. We have to make the market serve us, and not have us all be slaves the market, because the market is not going to care one whit about us increasingly over time."

"The United States should provide an annual income of $12,000 for each American aged 18–64, with the amount indexed to increase with inflation. It would require a constitutional supermajority to modify or amend. ... The poverty line is currently $11,770. We would essentially be bringing all Americans to the poverty line and alleviate gross poverty."

"Too many people ... haven't had the chance to pursue their dreams because they didn't have a cushion to fall back on if they failed... We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas."