For working class people, especially those holding down more than one job, this is an appealing argument — why should people get stuff for free when I am treated like a dog? However, this particular argument soon falls apart when one considers the large numbers of people doing make-work jobs or those which are actually socially harmful. An extreme example of this would be a burglar or a drug trafficker; these people may work hard, but it would be better for society if they didn’t work at all. Less obvious are the many people working in the grievance industry who actually make bad situations worse, and if you think fund managers benefit their wealthy clients, you haven’t read The Shares Game which points out that the best route for the average investor is simply to buy a tranche of shares and hold onto them. A quarter of a century after this iconoclastic book was published, the author was vindicated in spectacular fashion when a competition in South Korea showed that a parrot picking out shares with its beak outperformed most of the so-called professional investors.
There are plenty of other people making a comfortable living out of ignorance or gullibility, professional psychics and other flim-flam artists, for example.
People who adhere to pseudo-moral arguments to attack Andrew Yang are not asking the right question, namely what is the purpose of (paid) work? The answer is not to ennoble people with some ludicrous idea about the dignity of labour, but to produce the goods and services the community demands. Once this is acknowledged, most people will recognise work for what it is — a necessary evil, the curse of the drinking classes. The central bank — the Federal Reserve in the US — has two primary goals: to maintain a low rate of inflation, usually 2%, and to promote something called full employment. Again, paid employment is seen as a duty of those lower down the food chain. People of independent means are not required to work. How many unemployed billionaires are there?
Do we want to bring about full employment, so-called, at any cost? The best way to do that is to start a war, and at times people have actually called for this. Now let us consider Andrew Yang’s argument.
Advances in technology, in particular, automation, are destroying jobs. Should we strive to create new jobs, or is there a better way? Imagine a world in which all the paid work currently undertaken in the United States and elsewhere was performed by robots. Yes, this is an unlikely scenario, but imagine it: robots do all the work. How is purchasing power to be distributed? If robots can grow wheat, bake bread, and sell you the loaf, which is collected by your own personal robot, where do you get the money to pay for it?
Andrew Yang proposes a tax on Amazon and other mega-corporations to fund his freedom dividend; this is the one place he goes wrong. The freedom dividend must be paid out of newly created debt-free money as proposed by the great Major Douglas nearly a century ago.
The cost of the freedom dividend would be a lot less than we are led to believe by the apparatchiks. For one thing, it would enable most if not all state benefits to be gradually phased out. This would reduce bureaucracy enormously, and benefit fraud with it. Petty crime would undoubtedly fall, and the burden on both social services and charities would be reduced.
Best of all, the freedom dividend would destroy the poverty trap and enable many people at the bottom of society to supplement their basic income by performing low paid work, work which under the current régime is not economical for employers to farm out.
Although the goal of the freedom dividend is to provide a universal basic income, it cannot be universalised at present. The United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, certain Middle East nations and possibly China would be able to implement some sort of freedom dividend, but for it to be extended to the rest of the world would require a greater investment in infrastructure and resources than at present. But, it must come, because for those at the bottom of the food chain, the alternative does not bear thinking about.
[The above article was first published on Medium, September 13, 2019].
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