Now here's an idea I can go for. A three hour work day and free
money. Yes! Yes! Yes!
Still, there's good food for thought in this article. And whether
I've ever said it or not, I do dream dreams of a Peaceful, Clean,
Healthy, Happy Future. My dream world is one without national
borders. A Land of sharing and Caring for all Life.
What keeps my dream a dream, is the interference by the Billionaires
who profit so much from violence and destruction. A first step in
turning my dream into reality is to open the prison doors and put
these folks into decent housing, and give them good paying jobs,
cleaning up the Land and rebuilding the inner cities. One of their
tasks would be to build walls, a favorite topic of Donald Trump's.
These walls would be built around the estates of the Billionaires.
The gates would be guarded in order to ensure that the occupants could
never move about the Land that they had been destroying for so many
years. They would be cut off from any communication with one another.
They could live in their ill gotten luxury until they died, at which
time their estates would become public parks...except for a very few
that would stand as examples of how a few people exploited the
multitude. We would all wander about the lush surroundings, shaking
our heads. Then it would be off to the beaches, riding our Antigrav
Riders, that use no fossil fuel, and float in the air so we no longer
need roads.
And there's so much more to imagine in that wonderful dreamland.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/11/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
'Utopia for Realists' author Rutger Bregman argues that if you give people
a
basic income with no strings attached, they will make better decisions,
work
more, cost the state less in the areas of things like health care and
incarceration, and be happier. (photo: Ulrich Baumgarten/Getty)
Free Lunch for Everyone
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
10 May 17
Can Americans handle the new book 'Utopia for Realists'?
The first thing you notice about Utopia for Realists, the new book that
argues that money should be free and a 15-hour work week sounds about
right,
is its tone. Writer Rutger Bregman is cheerful, optimistic, imaginative,
welcoming, funny and economical – the opposite of most of our political
books, which tend to be fulminating, accusatory, combative and
narrow-minded, and all of these things across far too many pages.
Bregman is Dutch, which will be a strike against him on these shores, and
then there is the matter of his politics, which seem designed to infuriate
the entire spectrum of current American thought. He is for open borders,
which will make him an Antichrist to the Trump right, and he speaks warmly
of neoliberalism, which will make Sanders liberals cringe.
At the same time, the entire thesis of his book seems aimed at the tepid
incrementalism of mainstream Democrats, who reflexively dismiss all big
ideas as "politically unrealistic" and the work of "purity testers." He
will
have few natural allies on this side of the Atlantic, which may be one of
the reasons his international bestseller hasn't been reviewed in very many
of our major newspapers yet.
But Bregman's book is both a fun read and a breath of fresh air to anyone
who lived through the ghastly experience of last year's presidential
election season, which turned into an angry referendum on the relentless
narrowness of American politics.
Utopia for Realists is a book that argues, with humor and sympathy, that
we've all suffered from forgetting how to dream of a better world. "We
inhabit a world of managers and technocrats," he writes. "Political
decisions are presented as a matter of exigency – as neutral and objective
events, as though there were no other choice."
American writers continually made the mistake of trying to understand the
upheavals of last year in terms of the usual left-right explanations of the
world, instead of looking at more basic criteria. People everywhere were
depressed and bored out of their minds. They craved something new. Polls
consistently showed that people in both parties were unhappy with their
choices and wanted a new direction, almost irrespective of what that
direction was.
People wanted big ideas and big dreams, but Democrats and Republicans both
have been trained to imagine the future not as a better place, but one
filled with horror and destruction. On the right, the fantasy future is
overrun by benefit-devouring immigrants with scabies, while for the left
the
next decades are a hellscape filled with toxic greenhouse gases and
overfished oceans.
What I saw on the campaign trail last year was an electorate so desperate
for big dreams that they turned to lost paradises of the past.
Donald Trump promised to build walls to reverse the onslaught of
multiculturalism and send us back to a Fifties nirvana that never existed –
he literally promised Happy Days and even had Scott Baio as an opening-day
convention speaker.
For Democrats, meanwhile, the most exciting future was presented by a
septuagenarian socialist reintroducing the New Deal to young voters. Even a
mildly radical idea like free college aroused not just derision but anger
among "responsible" thinkers in both of the major parties and in the
punditocracy, ostensibly the place where we play with ideas in this
country.
Bregman argues that we are where we are because a century of bummerific
experiences with utopian ideas – fascism, communism, Nazism, to name a few
–
have left us imagining that "dreams have a way of turning into nightmares"
and that "utopia is a dystopia." This has left us with a world where
"politics has been watered down to problem management" and "radical ideas
about a different world have become literally unthinkable."
Even liberalism, Bregman argues, has become pessimistic, an ideology that
is
"all but hollowed out," with young people trained to "just be yourself" and
"do your thing." That's probably an overstatement and a cliché. But there's
probably also some truth to the idea that a lot of the controversies about
safe spaces are the end result of a new emphasis on trying to make the
individual feel maximally safe and accepted within the larger context of a
world we've unconsciously come to accept as essentially unchangeable.
Government, too, Bregman argues, has mostly given up trying to make a
better
world, and has instead focused on policing it better. "If you're not
following the blueprint of a docile, content citizen," he writes, "the
powers that be are happy to whip you into shape" – with control,
surveillance, repression.
The welfare state is where Bregman sees the ultimate perversion of the
utopian instinct. It's become "a grotesque pact between left and right," in
which conservatives have spent a generation making sure people getting aid
are punished and villainized as lazy and work-averse, while progressives
have used public assistance as a way to lever more control over the lives
of
poor people who aren't trusted to make the right life choices. Anyone who
has covered the way the remains of the welfare bureaucracy works knows this
is true, that we have made receiving any kind of aid to keep yourself or
your children alive a humiliating, intrusive experience, one that invites
an
army of inspectors into your home, who examine everything from how many
toothbrushes you have in your bathroom to whether your Facebook page shows
you're spending your time wisely.
Bregman thinks we should just give people money, no questions asked, and
let
them sort it out. His prescriptions are humorously simple. He quotes
economist Charles Kenny, who notes "the reason poor people are poor is
because they don't have enough money." And he tells the fascinating true
story of that time that Richard Nixon – Richard Nixon! – tried to implement
a law guaranteeing a basic family income for all Americans.
The story is one of those classic absurdist tales of history. Nixon's brain
led him to this idea by means of some bizarre accident – he apparently
thought "Tory men and liberal policies" are what "changed the world," and
saw the plan as the ultimate marriage of conservative and progressive
politics, something that would make his name ring out forever: Richard
Nixon, guarantor of universal dignity.
But of course aides who hated the idea (including one who was an Ayn Rand
fan) pushed him away from the plan, and it morphed into yet another plan to
castigate the lazy poor by forcing them to work. Later in the Seventies,
the
idea vanished altogether thanks to another classic political reason – a
typo, which mistakenly showed that experiments in this area revealed a 50
percent higher divorce rate, which naturally led men to worry that
guaranteeing women a basic income would leave them with no reason to stay
home. Years later it turned out that basic income experiments had shown no
impact on the divorce rate.
One of the reasons the welfare state is so unpopular in America is because
every aid program ends up being income-dependent. You can't qualify for aid
here until you're poor enough, but we treat the poor as work-averse
parasites with bad judgment who have to be monitored round-the-clock. But
studies abroad show that the countries with the most universal programs are
the most successful and engender the least hostility. "Basically," Bregman
writes, "people are more open to solidarity if it benefits them
personally."
Bregman's basic ideas are pretty simple. He thinks (and many scientists
agree with him) that if you give people a basic income with no strings
attached, they will make better decisions, work more, cost the state less
in
the areas of things like health care and incarceration, and be happier and
feel less humiliated, scared, and insecure. He quotes Woody Allen, who
pointed out that "money is better than poverty, if only for financial
reasons."
He also argues pretty forcefully that working longer hours makes us less
productive and also more unhappy. At some point in the arc of
industrialized
countries, we end up working more and more hours just so we can acquire
more
and more stuff we don't need. More relaxing, less working and consuming –
that's where we should be looking. So he proposes a 15-hour work week. I'm
sure people here will hate the idea.
And who knows, maybe none of it works in practice. But what's so
interesting
about modern America is our hostility to the mere idea of trying to create
an easier and happier life. We're a country that was once rich with social
experimentation, from the Shaker colonies to Brook Farm to Oneida to New
Harmony to the Fourierist experiments to the Octagon community of
vegetarians to a long list of others, many of them amusingly crazy, who
tried to use the accident of plenty as an excuse to build a better way to
live.
Now we don't really even try, and mostly just scream at each other on the
Internet. That doesn't seem like it will get us there. Maybe free money and
a three-hour work day won't, either, but it sure seems like it would be
more
fun to try.
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
