 of the arts, as well as other endowments, to a UBI.. One more glance out the window? If they give you money for nothing it will only be as a pass through to someone else more important than you…you could always learn to play the guitar…..
The people who made the FDR programs work were very different from the people milling around and looking for 10-baggers today. Many were educated in schools that taught using the McGuffey Readers and Beards’ history, and inculcated with various kinds of civic virtue in institutions like “churches” that were not as corrupt as the prosperity-gospel and nativist Nativity-its of today, the ones who preach mostly out of the Old Testament and the PR releases of “Saint Paul,” that grand showman of Xtianity. Back then they didn’t have generations of Exceptionalism and constant learning of wedge “truthiness” to make the kind of cooperative effort of the New Deal a lot harder. and bureaucracy and well-organized lobbying and looting techniques and regulatory capture and the rest.
And of course there were resources to exploit to make it all work, and the weather patterns were different (plant 3 billion trees exactly WHERE, these days? Where the wildfires bloom?). And as noted there are all these codes and overlapping regulatory structures, each of which was born out of some kind of corporate abuse or corruption, only to be gamed and corrupted in turn.
And I would love for there to be some sudden change of heart that would let us mopes do the kind of internal empire-rebuilding that would provide concrete material benefits of general application once again. But the works of the CCC and WPA and the rest were fortuitous gifts to the future of the country, from a generation or two that suffered the slings, arrows, wars and privations brought on by the apparently inevitable construct of what we call “capitalism.”
But let’s come up with an organizing principle or two, like the ones that motivated the men, mostly, who saw needs – like starving, restless masses of people, and “visions” of better public spaces and such, and filled it, adhering mostly to the principle of the “general welfare”? At the local level and on up, they had something to guide and test the manifold aspects of those many initiatives and projects against. Generally not “how can I get rich off this, or benefit my little bunch of rich friends?” All those improvements of access to wilderness and park areas are great, until they open up areas for “public-private partnerships” or straight privatization. So we have rationing of access to such places, thanks to what I recall is “the paradox of the aggregate:”. “That restaurant is so popular, no one goes there any more.”
“But let’s come up with an organizing principle or two”
This is really the crux of it, isn’t it? From what I read on NC and elsewhere, the institutions that make the decisions in our society are not only corrupt but also lacking in any kind of moral and ethical guidance beyond “what’s in it for me.” A lot has changed since 1933, and Frances Perkins has been dead more than 50 years.
I don’t see any sort of reawakening taking place among the 10% that serve the billionaires. How can we expect that 10% and the institutions it controls to oversee a massive effort to do the jobs that truly need doing when they currently use their power to do just the opposite?
If those organizing principles, a new ethic, can come into being and spread, it will have to be from the currently powerless. A UBI would keep us fed and housed while allowing us to use our time to self-organize for solving neighborhood problems with our increased, though still meager, resources.
Henry, your last sentence, “A UBI would keep us fed and housed while allowing us to use our time to self-organize for solving neighborhood problems with our increased, though still meager, resources,” contains all we mopes need to know about why “it’ll never happen.” Neither the UBI, except as a leash and collar and gag, (speak up and lose your benefits), nor the awakening that might undergird the stuff the NC people see is needed (even though we can’t altogether agree on what all those things are, it seems).
Not that people of good will will not keep trying, and the ones who prevail by creating resilient decent communities of comity might have the last laugh. Albeit zero satisfaction that the architects of what’s coming got what ought to be coming to them, since they will be off to their sanctuaries, or dead of natural causes after getting the best and most loving care that money can buy… And so they can laugh as they pass, whipping off a last blast: “Apres nous le deluge.”
Case 1: A worker getting $12/hr gets $15/hr under the new min. wage law. Is he getting $3/hr for doing nothing new?
Case 2. A guy getting $0/hr gets $3/hr under a test basic income scheme, is he getting $3/hr for doing nothing new?
Will the extra $3/hr be ‘as a pass through to someone else more important than you?
And does the answer change if it’s $10/hr, instead of $3/hr more (i.e.the new min. wage is $22/hr, for a person making $12/hr)?
‘as a pass through to someone else more important than you?’
With either plan, the line of ‘more important people’ forms on the right. Let’s see, there are landlords, property developers, banks, payday loan outfits, and I almost forgot — insurance companies. Employers, who will be able to download more of medical insurance costs onto employees. So, it seems once again that the rich will get richer and the poor get poorer. This is just not going to work without some way to keep all the new $$ from ending up at the top. Maybe we could tax the rich, too?
That is, to be clear, the argument that ‘people getting UBI would just lose it to more important people than you, or us,’ is not an argument against UBI only.
It’s an argument against higher min. wage, wage growth, UBI, etc. And to address that, the lesson, then, is not to abandon those ideas, but to find ‘some way to keep all the new $ from ending up at the top.’
So, on this issue alone, UBI is on an equal footing with JG.
Select the cases that give you the answer you want.
The local grocery chain starts the schlub worker at around $8.50 an hour, to unoad trucks, bend down or kneel or reach to stock shelves, unerringly be “retail polite and deferential” to all customers (in fear of being otherwise to the “secret shoppers” who prowl the aisles looking for people to “write up” for not adhering to Corporate Standards), bag groceries for often irascible customers, go out in cold and mostly heat and rain and lightning to retrieve grocery carts from the often large parking lots (in a task that I think as “Sisyphean” since it never ends — most “consumers” think it is their right, or their need if disabled, to leave the carts askew where they unloaded them, but hey, it’s part of the real-world very-limited kind of “job guarantee” we more fortunate can sneer at).
And that wage is of course higher than in many similar operations.
So is the guy or gal, or often older person who didn’t come up a winner in the stock market casino or had some life problem that made them have to keep working on weak legs and bad feet and knees and back until they get sick enough to be stuffed into a Medicaid-grade “nursing home,” or die standing where they are (this has happened in my local store) “getting a couple of bucks more for doing nothing new”? Lots of judgments being made about the “price” of an hour of labor, no? And who are the few that get to make and enforce those judgments?
And “the guy getting $0,” who now gets $3: why, again, was he getting $0? Dis-employed, disabled, disenfranchised, living in some place where “industry/capital” has emptied out the community and moved its operations to Lower Slobovia to make the LSians sprint in the Great Race To The Bottom?
Case 3: Set yourself the task of determining what a “fair living wage” is, and make the argument that supports whatever you come up with. In context. With footnotes.
Yes, follow the money. Inward and upward. And the fix is…?
The cases (and more can be presented) are to make this point:
If hourly workers can be given additional money, why can’t those, for example, staying at home taking care of their families? Must they toil more?
And then, there is the other question raised by HotFlash – is it hopeless that people (working in the traditional sense, and not working but are in fact working as they take care of family members at home, for example) have extra money, from either wage growth, increasing the min. wage or UBI? Will it all go to the more important people (than you, or on top)?
‘as a pass through to someone else more important than you?’
Keep in mind, this is the whole idea of why silicon valley is proposing a UBI