I can certainly go with your dream, Miriam. Still, I do like the idea
of former detainees happily building walls around the palatial
estates. We can also take away their money, for sure. We would send
out Meals on Wheels with standard K Rations, and Flint, Michigan
water. But I really do like the idea of the Billionaires being forced
to live out their lives isolated in their own ill gotten homes.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/11/17, M Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd just take away all of that money from the very wealthy, immediately and
their multiple dwellings. All of that money would go into the pot from which
everyone would have a decent income, and it would certainly be more than $15
an hour.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2017 10:52 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Free Lunch for Everyone
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.
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