ALB
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Yes. A guaranteed income scheme already exists in Britain — the tax credit scheme. At least this is a subsidy only for employers paying the lowest wages. A basic income scheme, as a government handout to everyone, would be a subsidy to all employers.
How can its advocates be so naive or economically ignorant as to think it would have no effect on wages. Even the government realises that their income support scheme has this effect and is why they have introduced minimum wage legislation as a way of reducing the subsidy to employers.
Actually, Rutger Bregman is the best of them as he sees it as the basis for a new society, a “utopia”, taking account of the fact that enough could be produced to ensure that everybody could have enough of what they needed, and not just a reform of the poor law. He should take a step further and become a socialist.
Book Reviews: ‘Utopia for Realists’, & ‘A Place of Refuge – An Experiment in Communal Living’
I think he has since written a new book which might be worth us reviewing.
The proposal for a universal basic income must be one of the silliest reforms ever conceived. Its proponents seemed to have never heard of Speenhamland and so don’t realise that they are proposing a wage subsidy to employers, which would result in all wages tending for fall by the amount of the basic income, in the Scottish proposal by £5,200 a year.
Revealing interview in today’s Times with one of Trump’s top military advisers, which shows that he is as more stupid than that king in the Ivory Coast who at least didn’t believe that the present pandemic and resulting slump is the result of a conspiracy:
“The fact is China knew it had an epidemic but continued to allow international flights out of the country, even from Wuhan, after they had closed the city down,” General Jack Keane, an influential military adviser to President Trump, said in an interview with The Times.
He added: “The Chinese Communist Party did a good job protecting their political and financial power centres but they consciously let those flights [abroad] continue, knowing that it would spread the virus. They wanted other economies to suffer.
“They didn’t want their economy to be the only one to suffer. That was a conscious decision. I think they wanted to make certain that countries around the world would suffer ecnomic retraction.”
I don’t suppose that Trump, the politician, really believes that China really took action to try to deliberately provoke a world slump (though, as they say, all is fair in love and war). He is just giving the impression that he does as this election year for him. But it is quite possible that some bonehead general does.
We beat the Grauniad to this, with this article and a talk on Discord:
The Compass proposal is just a stunt to publicise this reform, as if in the present state of finances the government is going to pay everyone an extra £60 a week (over £3000 a year) even those who kept working ( and billionaires who live off profits).
Not that the proposal is that generous. It would only bring up what a single jobseeker would get to the level of the basic state pension. In giving people a cheque for $1200 (£950) Trump was paying them the equivalent of £60 a week for 4 months.
The Compass proposal also mixes UBI as a reform of the poor law with the old failed Keynesian policy of the government trying to stimulate growth by increasing consumer spending, which was what Trump was trying to do too.
That’s an oxymoron, a bit like him:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Knight_(anthropologist)
Long-time Labour Party member and well-known eccentric.
To keep this monkey business on theme, in the search for a vaccine it seems scientists will be experimenting on monkeys. Ideally they should experiment on humans but this is regarded as “unethical” but J O’s point will be that it is unethical, perhaps more so, to experiment on other animals.
What makes it “unethical” to experiment on humans is not just an ethical question. It is also a legal one as humans have legal rights and if anything goes wrong the experimenter can be sued. In fact the whole testing procedure for vaccines and drugs, which requires testing on animals first, is designed precisely to lessen the risk of people suing the drug company. And so is a direct consequence of capitalism.
In socialism there would be nothing in the way of experiments directly on humans, volunteers of course.
I hold no brief for the sod but he might not be lying as memory is anything but reliable;
The same applies of course to his accuser.
Both could believe they are telling the truth but not be accurately recalling events of thirty years ago. Which means there is no way of establishing what happened.
In the first twenty or so years of the last century when industrial unionism was a big issue, the SPGB never denied that the working class, when it had become socialist, would need to organise both politically ( to gain control of the political power vested in the state ) and economically (to keep production going both during and immediately after the socialist revolution).
The difference between us and De Leon and the SLP was over three questions.
1. Which was the more important. We said political (because that’s where ultimate social control of lay). The SLP said economic (as that’s where the workers’ economic power was). We replied that working class economic power was an illusion — the employers could always starve the workers back to work especially if they had the backing of the state, and to try to “take and hold” the means of production while the capitalist class controlled the state was a recipe for disaster.
2. Who were to be the members of the socialist economic organisation. The SLP implied anybody. We said that this would mean it would include non-socialists and, in that case, how could then it be an instrument for socialism. If, on the other hand, it was to be composed only of socialists it would not have many more members than the socialist political party and so be ineffective even as an organisation to extract better wages and conditions from employers.
3. When should it be formed? The SLP said now even though only a small minority of workers were socialists. Hence the dilemma outlined above that they faced: either it would include non-socialists or it would be small and ineffective. We said that the workers would form it when large numbers of them had become socialists and that it wasn’t just idle speculation and even undemocratic for a tiny number of socialists to lay down what it should be. In the meantime socialists should join existing unions as the best way to protect wages and conditions. I think that the SLP soon abandoned its position of trying to form a revolutionary socialist union to rival the existing pure and simple unions (“dual unionism”) and in practice now adopt the same practice as us of joining existing unions. I could be wrong as maybe they don’t join any union, i.e. take up the anti-union position that we are always falsely accused of.
What are we to make of these stats?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-52507770
“People living in more deprived areas have experienced Covid-19 mortality rates more than double those living in less deprived areas,” said Nick Stripe of the ONS.
“General mortality rates are normally higher in more deprived areas, but so far Covid-19 appears to be taking them higher still.””
Does it mean that, if there had been no lockdown, even more people per head from “deprived” areas would have died ? Or that it is because of the lockdown that more people per head from these areas are dying, as this is where those least protected from its economic effect live? Or simply that mortality rates are “normally” higher in these areas?
Maybe but stuff is retrievable. Also you are forgetting that the internet provides wide access to the content of the books you value. For instance there’s the Gutenberg Project:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg
This allows people to read books they would otherwise find difficult to get hold of in book form.
I am sure they will all be backed-up somewhere.
The Internet is a great invention. Of course under capitalism it’s full of crap (adverts and scams not to mention ravings of the likes of David Icke) but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
They are just as stupid but not as cruel in the Ivory Coast:
The old Aberdeen Group of the Party produced a document on Marx’s Economic and Political Manuscripts in the early 1970s. If anyone would like an electronic version of it, email Head Office at spgb [at] worldsocialism.org
Yes, those workers are fucked whatever the governments there decided or didn’t decide. No lockdown and they risk death from the virus; lockdown and they starve — because they are living in a capitalist world where you have to have a money income to survive.
The pope recognised this, hence his call for them to be paid a universal basic income. But there’s no chance of that happening. In fact as long as there’s capitalism there’s nothing that can be done about it.
So, socialism is quite literally the only way out for them, where everybody would have access to what they needed to live and enjoy life as a matter of right, only possible on the basis of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources having become the common heritage of all.
Dave, what point are you trying to make by repeating these news reports in lengthy detail? Is it that the government should not have treated the epidemic as a public health emergency and not give priority to trying to deal with it, to do “fuck all” as you once put it, and let it run its course?
You do realise that nobody’s going to read a post of that length? Why not just summarise what is reported and provide a link for anyone to follow up if they want to check or know more?
