Justice

"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."

"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."

"A host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife, and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated."

"Computers and robots replace humans in the exercise of mental functions in the same way as mechanical power replaced them in the performance of physical tasks. As time goes on, more and more complex mental functions will be performed by machines. Any worker who now performs his task by following specific instructions can, in principle, be replaced by a machine. This means that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish—in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors."

"Artificial intelligence is here and it is accelerating, and you're going to have driverless cars, and you're going to have more and more automated services, and that's going to make the job of giving everybody work that is meaningful tougher, and we're going to have to be more imaginative, and the pact of change is going to require us to do more fundamental reimagining of our social and political arrangements, to protect the economic security and the dignity that comes with a job. It's not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. And so we're going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income, review of our workweek, how we retrain our young people, how we make everybody an entrepreneur at some level. But we're going to have to worry about economics if we want to get democracy back on track."

"If you provide a basic income, you send a powerful message: nobody wants to just sit there and do nothing, we trust you to find a valuable occupation. The idea of morality of work is one of the most insidious tools in the hands of power, and increases the bullshit jobs phenomenon."

"Everybody should be guaranteed a decent basic income. A rich country such as the U.S. can well afford to keep everybody out of poverty. Some, it will be said, will seize upon the income and won’t work. So it is now with more limited welfare, as it is called. Let us accept some resort to leisure by the poor as well as by the rich."

"Throughout most of recorded history, the only people who actually did wage labor were slaves. ... It’s only now that we think of wage labor and slavery as opposite to one another."

"A guaranteed income would not only establish freedom as a reality rather than a slogan; it would also establish a principle deeply rooted in Western religious and humanist traditions: man has the right to live, regardless! This right to live —to have food, shelter, medical care, education, etc.— is an intrinsic human right that cannot be restricted by any condition, not even the one that the individual must be socially "useful.""

"One obvious way to help fund a citizen's dividend or guaranteed income would be to levy a carbon tax, and therefore you'd be doing something very positive for the environment. ... I think there's a strong relationship between these two issues. On the one hand we have to take on these environmental challenges, on the other hand we've got this unfolding trend going on which is impacting people's income security and those two are directly related: as long as people perceive that they're not secure economically, they're worrying about paying their rent next month, or they're worried about putting food on the table, they're not gonna be able to focus on longer-term environmental issues. And that's one of the big problems we see with climate change: if you look at surveys of the American people, they acknowledge that climate change is an issue, but it's also absolutely at the bottom of their list of priorities, and the top of their list, of course, is jobs, it's incomes. So I really think that if we want to have meaningful progress on environmental issues like climate change we need to put this whole issue of income security and income inequality first-hand at the top."

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

"It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working."

"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system."

""Jobs for every American" is doomed to failure because of modern automation and production. We ought to recognize it and create an income-maintenance system so every single American has the dignity and the wherewithal for shelter, basic food, and medical care. I’m talking about welfare for all."

"I'm always concerned about, more than anything else, the waste of human potential. ... So much intelligence is wasted from poverty. People who simply don't have the time, the space to use their imaginations. They can't be creative, because to be creative requires that, for a little while at least, you let go of the basic concerns of staying alive—you can't really be creative if survival is the primary topic on your mind. And so I've been thinking about that for a long time, thinking how do we utilize the cumulative intelligence and creativity of people? And recently I heard of ... a very simple idea, ... which is: give everyone some money every week. No matter how rich they are, how poor they are, just make sure that there's a basic income level beyond which people don't fall. ... I like the idea that it says we believe that all people are potentially creative and that they should be given the chance to express that."

"Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. ... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."

"The very nature of work will change. The governments may have to consider stronger social safety nets, and eventually universal basic 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?"

"Those in supreme power, politically and economically, aren't yet convinced that our Planet Earth has anywhere nearly enough life support for all humanity. They assume it has to be either you or me, that there is not enough for both. Those with financial advantage reason that selfishness is necessary and fortify themselves even further... Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material. We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be "you or me," so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do. This is not a visible revolution and it is not political. You’re dealing with the invisible world of technology."

"A guaranteed income ... could for the first time free man from the threat of starvation, and thus make him truly free and independent economically and psychologically. ... People would no longer learn to be afraid, if they did not have to fear for their bread."

"We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash [which] would provide an assured minimum to all persons in need, regardless of the reasons for their need, while doing as little harm as possible to their character, their independence, or their incentives to better their own conditions. ... A negative income tax provides comprehensive reform which would do more efficiently and humanely what our present welfare system does so inefficiently and inhumanely."

"I think we need to do something different and what I have proposed is that eventually we're going to have to move toward a Guaranteed Income where everybody is guaranteed at least some livable income in our society."

"If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too."

"That's why I talk about basic income ... there has to be a stronger social safety net because when people don't have options, they're going to make bad choices. Let's have better choices on the table."

"The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born."

"There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody."

"If you can provide a mechanism where anybody can try any commercial idea without risking becoming homeless and indebted, more people will innovate and take risks."

"The economic impact of the UBI together with the three tax changes in the US would be roughly as follows. First, bank deposits from UBI would increase significantly. Experience says that low-income beneficiaries would first pay off their high-cost credit card loans and student loans (though maybe not all at once). Money left over after that would be spent on household goods and services... Private debt would fall, but overall the government debt might increase equally, perhaps by US$500 billion per annum... UBI would actually cut some existing government costs, both for targeted welfare services that would become redundant, and even for prisons and police. Higher personal incomes available to spend on goods and services would also generate more tax revenues for the government. It is unclear how much would be added to the current intake, probably less than the net cost of the UBI. But the net deficit at the end of the day might be quite small or even non-existent. A viable democratic social system must not allow a "winner takes all" approach... It is time to consider another way of getting money into the system, without funnelling it directly through the banks to the wealthy...."

"With a basic income, more people can choose for themselves whether to work full-time or part-time, making their own tradeoffs between more money and more leisure."

"Basic income grants freedom and security without strings attached. It automatically supplements low wages without bureaucracy or complex wage subsidies."

"Unless we abandon the work ethic of another era, ... lives may be wasted because of blind insistence that everyone must have a "job" even if the job is useless."

"The State ... should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family."

"'Suppose there were a man, a slave, a labourer, getting up before you and going to bed after you, willingly doing whatever has to be done, well-mannered, pleasant-spoken, working in your presence. And he might think, ... "I ought to do something meritorious. Suppose I were to shave off my hair and beard, don yellow robes, and go forth from the household life into homelessness!" And before long, he does so. And he, having gone forth might dwell, restrained in body, speech and thought, satisfied with the minimum of food and clothing, content, in solitude. And then if people were to announce to you: "Sire, you remember that slave who worked in your presence, and who shaved off his hair and beard and went forth into homelessness?" ... Would you then say: "That man must come back and be a slave and work for me as before?"No indeed, Lord. For we should pay homage to him, we should rise and invite him and press him to receive from us robes, food, lodging, medicines for sickness and requisites, and make arrangements for his proper protection.'"

"If you read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25, it says people have rights to adequate food, nutrition, health, employment, security and so on. Those are minimal rights. Any society ought to guarantee that. Well, one way to guarantee that would be through a socially-acceptable form of basic income."

"In general, I favor some form of a guaranteed income. I think we're gonna have to move in that direction ultimately, I don't think there's going to be any other choice."

"Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

"Is ill-language a justification for blows?"

"There are a thousand things might have been a justification."

"The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done."

"Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply."

"Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity’s memory."

"if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law's protection most! — and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person — ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."

"All of our punishment institutions, including jails, laws, church confessionals, and so forth, are systems of illusion. The order of the universe, the infinite justice of yin and yang, naturally takes care of all motion and compensation. We don't need to invent arbitrary ways to make balance with punishments."

"We regard it as an onerous but yet in another regard also a satisfying and fascinating task to be a servant of justice who discovers guilt and crime. We are amazed at such a person’s acquaintance with the human heart, with all the evasions and fabrications, even the most sophistical: how he is able to remember from year to year the most insignificant things merely in order to secure, if possible, a clue; how he, just by looking at the circumstances, seems to be able to conjure them into giving evidence against the guilty one; how nothing is too trivial for his attention, provided it could clarify his construction of the crime."

"He shall have merely justice and his bond."

"Karma is a beneficent law wholly merciful, relentlessly just, for true mercy is not favor but impartial justice... With reincarnation the doctrine of karma explains the misery and suffering of the world, and no room is left to accuse Nature of injustice."

"Justice is a constant and perpetual will to render to everyone that which is his own."

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice."

"Justice is equality of rights in treatment, proportionate compensation for labour and punishment for crime, and compassion and relief for sufferers."