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RE: The Progressive Case for Greatly Replacing the Welfare State with Unconditional Basic Income
Hefty, amazing write-up on the subject, and hopefully it will get the attention it deserves. My only addition is that I believe that UBI is a stepping stone to a Universal Corporate Dividend either on top of or replacing it (as corporations continue to grow and everything else continues to fade away) that all people should receive, and that is kind of implied in UBI, but I think there are some key differences, at least as far as how I envision UCD should be implemented. Welfare being used as a control tool and a deterrent to moving up is a complete joke, society can and should do far better than what we have done.
This has me thinking of the market socialism of Oskar Lange, Fred M. Taylor, and Abba Lerner, where industry is all publicly owned but citizens all get a social dividend from the publicly-owned industry. Also, Robert Anton Wilson's RICH economy idea is pretty cool, with the plan of automating everything and giving everyone a basic income. Wilson's plan would have basic income increase until it becomes a national dividend, where all of gross national product funds a dividend. Interesting ideas, in my opinion. I'm not really pushing for the full socialism thing, though. I want basic income and social democracy, but I do think that automated industries ought to be taxed to such an extent that it basically serves as an analogue to public-ownership. As they become more and more automated, they ought to be taxed more and more.
I think socialism can only evolve properly in a bubble, or if the whole world was socialist, along the original lines of thinking of when socialism could actually be successful. Competitive forces kind of squash the notion when it comes to head with capitalistic nations that compete for resources more ruthlessly. Social democracy is nice, nearly anything is better than most of what's out there in the world now. I personally think that things should be taxed so heavily as to make most things unproductive, if we roll in the absolute costs of producing things then maybe we can save the world some destruction. Combine that with an educated population that understands the damage their consumption does and we're looking at a brighter future. Great to see other thinkers on the site talking about this kind of stuff.
Definitely. We need cap and trade and Pigouvian taxes, that will make the negative externalities be reflected in the final cost of products. That Noam Chomsky line is pretty much spot on: 'under existing capitalism, we have the socialization of costs and the privatization of profits.' We need to use taxation in order to keep corporations from being able to socialize costs.