Comments

How do we get there scientifically or wi Written by JSLarochelle on 2007-07-24 10:29:48 James Mulvale wrote: The critics of the concept are correct when they say that some versions of what might be passed off as 'GAI' (guaranteed adequate income) could be worse than the status quo.    BUT on the An Inconvenient Truth website we read: "Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced." | http://www.climatecrisis.net/aboutthefilm/    IN COMPARISON: "Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a thoroughly professional, frequently spectacular piece of muckraking | In the end, here was Ronald Reagan's 'magic of the marketplace' steeped in moral turpitude, the opportunities of government deregulation scornfully debased, the power of comic-book machismo unleashed . . ."  http://www.dallasobserver.com/2005-04-28/film/scoundrel-time/    "The Reagan-Thatcher revolution was so successful that it permanently undermined the traditional social-democratic/left-liberal consensus in a number of democratic countries. It worked domestically to undermine the left-liberal or social-democratic consensus, causing those parties to simply stop fighting and adopt much of the winning conservative agenda." -- Stephen Harper, "Rediscovering The Right Agenda," Report Magazine , June 2003 | "The Canadian Alliance leader outlines how social and economic conservatism must unite"  http://www.ccicinc.org/politicalaffairs/060103.html    If an Al Gore's climate change warnings are even partially right -- especially over the long haul of millions more years of life here on earth, then arguing about the pros and cons of various guaranteed income levels is pointless because the actual "status quo" is that vast numbers of young people have grown up believing they can become wealthy and all drive cars to the mall and even become billionaires like a J.K. Rowling.    SEE: Marginal Revolution's website: "Harry Potter and the Mystery of Inequality" | J.K. Rowling is the first author in the history of the world to earn a billion dollars."  http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/04/harry_potter_an.html    SEE: "Ranks of Canadian billionaires blossom" December 4, 2006 | CBC News | Canada has a record 46 billionaires, an annual survey by Canadian Business magazine says."  http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2006/12/04/rich.html    SEE: "Get a behind-the-scenes peek at Why We Want You to Be Rich in this video interview with Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki."  http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Want-You-Rich/dp/1933914025    On Capitalism Magazine Online, Richard M. Salsman wrote, "Economics is the science of wealth creation. Wealth is created in free markets. An economic scientist, one worthy of the name, should be able to explain how markets work. He should be able to derive, identify and apply the crucial principles driving market behavior" ("Nobel Prize for Economics Rewards Voodoo and Not Science, Part 2" | March 11, 2002 | http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1481    Ronald Reagan: "The societies which have achieved the most spectacular broad-based economic progress in the shortest period of time are not the most tightly controlled, not necessarily the biggest in size, or the wealthiest in natural resources. No, what unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace." -- Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the Boards of Governors of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund, September 29, 1981  http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/92981a.htm    Ronald Reagan: "World economic growth today is nearly twice what it was 4 years ago"    SEE: "In speech after speech he repeated, "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government IS the problem. The societies which have achieved the most spectacular broadbased economic progress in the shortest period of time ... What unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace." http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=2907    SEE: An apt metaphor is 'Raptor' (or vulture), which is the name Andy Fastow, financial wizard of Houston's defunct ENRON, gave to a shadow corporation hiding the company's nonexistent profits. . . . Ronald Reagan unleashed free markets upon the world by giving corporations expansive powers. Reagan pronounced, 'Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. The societies which have achieved the most spectacular broadbased economic progress in the shortest period of time ... What unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace.'" -- Carol Harvey, "Resisting Abusive Corporate Power," Street Spirit: Justice News & Homeless Blues | http://www.thestreetspirit.org/Feb2006/corporate.htm    BUT AS the economist Kenneth Boulding put it: "Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."  http://www.karavans.com/enter.html

Martin Luther King Jr.'s GI rhetoric ma Written by JSLarochelle on 2007-07-24 09:45:29 James Mulvale wrote: In this journey, it is important to build alliances and not to engage in rhetoric that paints those who have hesitations or criticisms as the enemy.    COMPARE: "The curse of poverty has no justification in our age." -- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, "1967    FROM progress.org: "The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Final Words of Advice"        "Few people have heard of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last book. It was called Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967)."    "Even fewer people realize that King was an advocate of a guaranteed income. He weighed the issue carefully before drawing conclusions and making the following statement.    "Toward the end of Where Do We Go From Here, in a chapter titled "Where We Are Going," King states his support for the guaranteed income policy, that right-wingers and left-wingers had both been studying. See what he says to us."    Martin Luther King, Jr.: "In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.    "Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one. Hence a housing program to transform living conditions, improved educational facilities to furnish tools for better job opportunities, and family counseling to create better personal adjustments were designed. In combination these measures were intended to remove the causes of poverty.    "While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or at a similar rate of development. Housing measures have fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies. They have been piecemeal and pygmy. Educational reforms have been even more sluggish and entangled in bureaucratic stalling and economy-dominated decisions. Family assistance stagnated in neglect and then suddenly was discovered to be the central issue on the basis of hasty and superficial studies. At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.    "In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing -- they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.    "I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.    "Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.    "We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.    "We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.    "The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.    "In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote, in Progress and Poverty:    "The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased."    "We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.    "Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life and in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he know that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.    "Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions.     "Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has risen, then the guaranteed income would hgave to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability.    "This proposal is not a "civil rights" program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.    "Our nation's adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits.    "John Kenneth Galbraith has estimated that $20 billion a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he describes as "not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in Vietnam."    "The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.    "The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."  Code: Code: nullnullprogress.org

Frum's anti- guaranteed income rant! Written by JSLarochelle on 2007-07-24 10:40:48 "Chrétien's plan for a Canadian underclass"  David Frum, National Post, December 16, 2000    "Jean Chrétien's post-election brainwave of a guaranteed annual income isn't merely sneaky, although it surely is that. It's not just a bad idea, although it is that, too. It is just about the worst idea that this government has had -- one that will accelerate Canada's trend toward a U.S.-style underclass all our own.    "We have always had poor people in Canada. But underclass poverty is different from the poverty of farm and fishing village. Underclass poverty is a poverty that separates people from the life of their society in an entrenched, permanent, helpless dependency, characterized by substance abuse, crime and suicide."    Page URL: http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=/stories/20001216/409314.html

Friedman started the GAI debate? Written by JSLarochelle on 2007-07-24 10:51:51 "Proponents of the GAI are often the first to point out that the idea was devised by Milton Friedman, an ardent defender of free markets." -- Chris Schafer, "Guaranteed Annual Income A Non-Starter " (Chris Schafer is an Honours Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University)    Fraser Institute, Canadian Student Review, February 2001   http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/admin/books/files/vol10no1.pdf

Adam Daifallah blames GI on Robert Stanf Written by JSLarochelle on 2007-07-24 11:01:42 "As leader, [ Robert] Stanfield kept the Tories ideologically vague. He campaigned in the 1968 election on a guaranteed annual income -- an idea even the Liberals rejected." -- Adam Daifallah, "Also-rans of the Trudeau era" National Post, Wednesday, September 28, 2005   http://www.daifallah.com/history.htm    "Adam Daifallah is the co-author of Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution"    http://forums.macleans.ca/advansis/?mod=for&act=dis&eid=10

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.

Powered by AkoComment 2.0!