Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, January 03, 2013

10G Coins for Everyone!


Coming swiftly on the heels of my counter-proposal of MLK to Atrios' suggestion that Reagan's face be placed on trillion dollar coins minted by the executive to circumvent future debt-ceiling hostage dramas proposed by suicidal homicidal Movement Republicans, I am pleased to fully endorse Atrios' more recent advocacy of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) via a 10g coinage mailed thereupon to every single person with a Social Security Number. While Atrios might envision such a mailing as a one shot stimulus, I would advocate an annual deposit. I am very serious about this (possibly more than Atrios actually is, but who knows).

Quite apart from the obviously stimulative effect this would have on the economy and quite apart from the obviously wholesome effect the steeply progressive tax code required to pay for this would have in ending our culture's suicidal subsidization of the untherapized sociopathy of people drawn to the finance sector (again, I'm not kidding), BIG would go far toward completing the democratic project of finally ending slavery in the US by creating a permanent strike fund curtailing the duressed wage slavery of the informal neoliberal precariat and also the stealth conscription via poverty and miseducation of our "all volunteer armed forces."

Here is a website where activists and professional economists and policy wonks talk about the implementation and ramifications of a basic income guarantee quite seriously. I have presented a paper at a conference of theirs myself, called "Pay to Peer" for which this is the abstract.

1 comment:

jollyspaniard said...

There's an article in today's Guardian along similar lines:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/02/poor-spend-big-business-cash-pile

The author of this article doesn't mention it but historicaly there have been a number of taxation and currency management schemes that disincentized hoarding money and funneled them into constructing something in the here and now for a percieved public good. I use the "percieved" qualification because the most notable example was how the construction of cathedrals was financed in Europe.

Things along these lines are quite doable and while there were unthinkable a few years ago the political will for something like this is coming. There's no point hoarding cash while human civilization literally burns up.