A sustainable method for voluntary Basic Income
For the past few years the basic income movement has been gaining popularity. Basic Income is essentially a form of social security system in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. Basic Income is a feel good solution to a feel bad problem. We feel bad that the lower 90% of the global population doesn't have their basic needs met because they don’t have enough money so naturally it would feel good if we just gave them more money so they could meet their needs right?
A few questions I always ask myself when reading about basic income are, where does the money come from because nothing in life is free? Does the government just create new fun coupons out of thin air diluting the already existing money supply? Do they create a hefty tax system instead? How do they enforce the tax? With threats of violence? Is it mandatory to participate? Does raising the floor also mean lowering the ceiling? How effective is a basic income if everyone also has the same starting point? How do they distribute the basic income? How do we truly know everyone is receiving the same amount? What keeps the disparity between the haves and have-nots down when everyone has the same arbitrary amount of new money? Are the experiments in basic income reliable because its not really a fair sample?
There are some fundamental problems with the basic income models that I’ve seen floating around because none of them seem to answer my questions. For a basic income to effectively raise the floor so that the ceiling is with in reach, everyone can’t be a participant in the same basic income program. People have to start from different starting points, because If the starting point is 0, and the height is 100, if I raise the floor from 0 to 100 and the ceiling goes from 100 to 200, there isn't any real gain, we just moved the goal post. in the basic income experiments I've seen, the results are tainted simply because they give a small group a monthly allowance but put them in an environment where everyone else doesn't get the same allowance. So they are turning have-nots into have-it-alls but placing them among the have-nots. Of course the have-it-alls are going to do well and have their needs met, because they have more than the have-nots.
Lets start thinking about basic income differently then. Imagine basic income isn’t just a way to give people an arbitrary amount of money every month, but what if basic income was actually profit sharing. Picture every time someone interacts with a governance service in your organisation, that person pays a small fee and that fee goes into a smart contract that redistributes the revenue with every identity that asks for it. Many governmental social programs sort of behave like this, but what they lack is complete transparency so what ends up happening is misappropriation of the organizations revenue. In short they spend it on things like bridges to no where so their buddies can get rich at the expense of the tax payers.
At Borderless.tech we are creating a transparent governance platform that offers a wide range of traditional governance services. Each service will live as immutable coding on a public ledger and cost a small fee to use. That small fee will then get pooled into a basic income smart contract and be redistributed according to the citizens intent. The citizens will be able to vote directly on how the basic income pool is split between the citizens and the global initiatives. The basic global initiatives citizens will have access to are nutrition, housing, education, healthcare and protection from aggression. Rather than getting an arbitrary amount of money the citizens will also have the option to receive their basic income in the form of basic needs met.
TLDR:
The current models of basic income are flawed, and Borderless.tech can solve the problem with cleverly designed code.
