Basic

A few days ago I saw this Bloomberg snippet, claiming that Spain wants to roll out a basic income scheme: This is a popular idea among many who believe that the role of the state is to cosset people from cradle to grave. It’s a nice, feelgood kind of a thing; everybody is housed, everybody is fed and everybody stays warm. In theory.

The basic tenets of a Universal Basic Income are that it would be:

·       Unconditional and Individual - everybody of the same age would receive the same basic income, regardless of gender, employment, family size, etc.

·       Automatic - basic income would be automatically paid into your bank account.

·       Non-withdrawable – that is UBI would not be means-tested and you would be free to earn whatever you wished on top of it.

·       A right for every legal resident, following a minimum qualifying period of residency.

People think that the current furlough situation – 80% of normal income for those to whom it applies - is some illustration of what UBI would mean to many. But this is exceptional and unaffordable beyond a very brief period. Basic will only ever mean basic; breadline. It wouldn’t even cover current rents in our major cities. Basic would not cover entertainment, internet access, or any form of luxury; it would be penury.

Now some might say, hey, I’m already poor, bring it on. Okay, let’s take a look: There are currently almost 68 million officially in the population, approximately 53 million of them adults. National ‘Living Wage’ is currently £8.72 per hour. That’s £348.80 for a 40-hour week and thus £18,137.60 per annum. Multiply that by 53 million and we get an annual bill of £961 billion, almost half of GDP, which puts the current short-term rescue measures in the shade.

And of course, no taxes would be paid by the recipients, just as no ‘actual’ tax is paid by anybody earning from the public purse. All effective taxation is paid by private companies and individuals from the surplus they generate. UBI would reduce this private sector considerably as people find ways to pool their meagre incomes to live tolerably well, in much the same way as some people manage to milk the benefits system.

Universal Basic Income is, essentially, a socialist ideal and so, in the same way that socialism always ignores the real outcomes in favour of its fairy tale imaginings, there would be social consequences which would further break down the social contract which currently exists. That is, we go to work, pay taxes and behave ourselves and in return the state provides education, healthcare, law and order, defence and a basic system of care and welfare to look after those unable to look after themselves.

If the tax burden rises too high, people remove themselves from the UK tax regime. It’s a balance that one side of the political divide takes seriously and the other side would wantonly abuse. In the socialist mind UBI would liberate the proletariat from the daily grind and free their creative potential. In reality there would be an increase in idleness, squalor and all kinds of fraudulent and anti-social activity. This would lead to an even greater stratification in society and even greater levels of inequality.

Just as ‘real socialism’ has never worked in any country which has tried it, neither has UBI. And just as ‘real socialism’, they insist, has never been tried, everywhere a UBI trial has been implemented it has been introduced for a short term, to specific parts of the populace and with conditions attached; which means it is not ‘real UBI’ either. As with all forms of socialism, unable to encourage and empower the population to level up, instead it commands the population to level down.

What are you worth?

Imagine a world where there was no work ethic. Imagine a world where, to survive, all you had to do was pick up your basic income and settle back into your armchair; where being in work was no longer a necessity. I have been invited to imagine such a world and I have found the prospect horrifying. Working has been the backbone of my life, from the very early days (sub-ten years old) of pocket money for odd jobs to my current 60-hour week I can’t imagine life without it. As I’ve got older I have toiled longer and become more dedicated to my work.

The work-life-balance trope is an illusory and often meaningless thing, espoused by those who think they have achieved it, much like Slimmer of The Year supposedly sets a shining example of what can be done with a bit of willpower, a gastric band and some judicious photo-shopping. For most people it is a distant dream. But could Universal Basic Income free us from that dream and make leisure and the pursuit of happiness a reality? Well, no; the idea is frankly preposterous.

An interlocutor on Twitter seemed to be all for it. He said "I'm not 100% sure of the benefits of a basic income, but I do believe it would work." Which, in a nutshell, encapsulated for me the deep waters of critical analysis which have been trawled in developing the idea. Like all social policies driven by dreams it envisages a humanity set free to explore everybody’s potential, where nobody is in fear of falling through the cracks and we all live happily ever after. The machines will do the work while we just sit back and enjoy our leisured liberty.

If only I had the time I could write that novel, invent that gadget, build that dream house, explore that vast untamed wilderness; the belief that this could happen is seductive. Yet where’s the evidence that this is likely? History’s great thinkers, its artists, its writers, its explorers, its pioneers in every field have done so not because they were freed from the drudge but in spite of it. For every success story there are a hundred others who tried and failed... and for every heroic failure there are thousands who just never got around to it.

Our forever burgeoning welfare state is a harbinger of what might happen under UBI. The odd J K Rowling may emerge from the experiment, but in reality most will simply languish on a subsistence level of unearned income and – rather than be the masters of the machine age – become slaves to state handouts. Those who do strike out to better themselves will come to resent the unnecessarily indolent even more than they currently do and tax avoidance will inevitably rise.

I heard a caller on LBC yesterday, earnestly explaining how she joined the Labour Party after the Jeremy Corbyn ascendency because she wanted to bring about a fair society. At the heart of her passionate thesis was a plea for egalitarianism; equality being the holy grail of those who believe in ‘social justice’. Universal Basic Income is not Labour policy (yet) but it might as well be. It is just the sort of crackpot theory that would appeal to those who feel they are owed a living.

Promoting the Utopia of a society with want vanquished could be seen as the worst kind of political mountebankery. If you want to keep left wing governments in power you need a solid voter base of poor, ill-educated people, who will vote uncritically for the slops served up in the state trough. Universal Basic Income would become – like the minimum wage – not the bare minimum, but the maximum wage for the untermenschen. Turnips for everybody, tovarishch! 

Panama People

I listened, incredulous (as is often the only way) when I heard a reporter on Radio 4’s Today programme announce that a study had discovered (‘discovered’ mind - no doubt by some Pulitzer-level miracle of investigative journalism) that over fifty percent of young people ‘drift’ into work without (gasp) a degree. She sounded astonished that such denizens were capable of breathing, let alone earning a living.

Drifting? As if the only way you could get to stack shelves, sweep up leaves or fuck about keeping people waiting for a cup of coffee – no, drawing a heart in the froth does NOT make you a barista – was if you had paid your dues at the altar of higher education. When the economically illiterate Tony Blair made the fallacious deduction that as graduates earned more than the hoi polloi, forcing 50% through the degree sausage machine would somehow increase everybody’s wage, those of us out here in the world of work were screaming “No!”

Getting a sixteen-year old to learn about getting to work on time, every day and actually, you know, working, is hard enough. Trying to do that with an endless succession of twenty-five year old graduates (MA in intersectional gender and social butt-hurt issues) who can’t yet tie their shoelaces and wear their sub-standard scholarship as an entitlement gong, is just a waste of everybody’s time and energy. Education isn’t about ‘things’ it’s about life, which includes finding out how everything actually works.

Maybe a lack of general common sense explains why so many people are over-excited about the ‘scandal’ of the Panama Papers. (Notwithstanding David Cameron’s clumsy handling of his own involvement) If only those nasty rich people who legally avoid paying more tax than the governments ask them to would voluntarily pay more tax – then we could have a universal basic income... they think.

“You didn’t just make that money.” they bleat, “Society let you make it.” Society, they say, built the roads, made the energy and bred and cared for the workers, all for those hated capitalists to exploit with their greedy ideas.  I have news; put everybody on a universal basic income and watch that income get redistributed really quickly, right back to the people you took it from. In any case, if everybody started out with something, that something would soon become the datum level... that is, two-grand or ten-grand, everybody would still, effectively, start out with nothing.

Every time some social justice type bangs this particular drum they assume that all the money that the people they hate have access to is unfairly gained, that it is liquid and that it can be effectively taxed. They assume that it can be equitably distributed at no cost and with zero corruption. They also imagine that if this is done, the people being fleeced will be happy to keep on generating more. Possibly the ultimate aspect of their naivety is the belief that everybody else – you know, the ones who are not capable of creating wealth – will spend it wisely.

Not funny... because it's true.

But here’s an idea. Maybe if they chose a vocational education early on, learned to become somebody useful, then went out to earn their own money not at 23 on some extended graduate trainee-ship, but at 16 when they should be perfectly capable of picking up a trade or other useful work skills; maybe then, by the time they come to have an interest in other people’s tax they will have paid plenty of their own and be very cautious of enabling the heavy hand of state to pick their pockets. Just a thought.