How a Basic Income can Help Us Achieve Liberty and Justice For All.
More than 200 years ago, our Founding Fathers declared that we are all created equal and we all have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. More than 100 years ago we fought a civil war and amended the Constitution to guarantee equal rights. Fifty years ago we outlawed discrimination. But recent police-caused deaths in Ferguson and Staten Island show that we are still not living up to our country’s ideals. How can we move forward and finally achieve liberty and justice for all?
Implement MLK’s final plan and give every citizen a basic income.
In his final years, Martin Luther King advocated for a basic income as the solution to poverty and a balm for racial equality. He said:
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.
A brave new world of abundance.
The thinking that was “archaic” in MLK’s time is positively obsolete now. We live in a world of increasing abundance. We have more food, more products, more stuff, and more computing power than our Founding Fathers —or even MLK, just 50 years ago—could have imagined. We have enough wealth for everyone to live a good life. Computers and robots will soon be able to do many of the jobs that humans don’t really want to do — cleaning toilets, pushing paperwork, repetitive factory work, even driving — leaving humans free to do the work that is meaningful to us— taking care of other people, creating, learning, and innovating. Unleashing all that human power to create and innovate will create even more abundance.
A world of abundance can be a world of liberty and justice, where everyone is free to live the life that they want to live.
Unfortunately, liberty and justice don’t automatically follow abundance. If people still believe that there is not enough to go around, then they will continue to protect themselves, to hoard whatever wealth comes their way, to discriminate against others, and to justify violence. By protecting ourselves from perceived scarcity, we perpetuate a world of scarcity. To make the switch from a world of racism and violence to a world where every person has a right to live the life they want to live, we must continue to generate abundance, to be sure. But we also need to nurture a mindset of abundance.
It doesn’t feel very abundant.
Most Americans lost half their wealth in the last 25 years. Cheaper labor overseas and ever-smarter computers and machines will destroy even more middle-class American jobs in coming years. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Americans are realizing we have no power in our so-called democracy. This feels like a world of scarcity. The idea of “white privilege” may sound like a cruel joke when it seems like you have so little.
Our fear of scarcity — the deeply ingrained view that there is not enough to go around, so we each need to get ours before someone else takes it from us — stops us from realizing the benefits of our new abundance. The three interlocking problems in my previous post all arise from this mindset of scarcity: when there is not enough to go around, the natural and rational reaction is to huddle with your tribe and defend your turf. You want to protect what little food or shelter or possessions or opportunities you have. Because other people are going to try to take them from you because they, too, don’t have enough. This scarcity-fueled defensive tribalism inflames racial prejudice because people who look different from you are not members of your tribe and may be threats. It inflames violence because you feel the need to protect yourself, your children, you possessions by whatever means necessary, including guns and excessive police force.
But we live in a world of abundance. Huddling with your tribe is no longer the right strategy. Perpetuating racism and condoning violence are exactly the wrong strategies. In a world where cooperation and innovation are generating more and more, tribalism and violence will get you less and less.
A basic income can change our reality and our mindset to one of abundance.
We need to shift from a world of scarcity where there is not enough to go around and our tribal instincts are constantly inflamed, to a world of abundance where there is room for everyone to thrive. To make this shift, we should implement MLK’s final dream and give every American a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) or Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) — enough money to subsist — to get food and shelter. A universal basic income sets up a base level of justice: no American will fall into poverty and desperation through no fault of their own. It sets up a base level of liberty: every American will be free to do the things they want to do — to get educated, to take care of children, to pursue a passion — without fear that they could end up on the street. A basic income would:
- Immediately eliminate poverty. Poor people need money — not food stamps, not subsidized housing, not another hoop to jump through — they need money. Eliminating poverty would mitigate some of the racism associated with poverty. More than a quarter of blacks in the US are poor (compared to less than 10% of whites). Giving everyone enough money to live would create a liberty and justice floor for everyone, but the lack of a floor currently disproportionately impacts blacks.
- Undermine the “proof” that racists cling to. A village in Namibia gave everyone a basic income starting in 2008. The white farmer who paid his black workers pittance wages thought it was a terrible idea to give them money because they would only drink. What actually happens when you give people enough money to live? They become entrepreneurs. One woman started a successful bakery, now that she had time to bake and her neighbors had money to buy bread. Another started raising chickens and selling the eggs. Other women started making and selling clothes, now that they could pay the bus fare to go buy fabric. And of course, everyone put their children in school. I am not under any delusion that the farmer is going to change his mind. But I think his children will. Instead of growing up seeing black people overworked, underfed, with no hope of getting ahead, the next generation in that Namibian village will see black people innovating and making life better for themselves, their neighbors, and their children. With a basic income, the 25% of American blacks who are poor would suddenly be at liberty to become entrepreneurs too.
- Banish fear. Many Americans today do not have the safety net to weather an event like losing a job or a loved one getting sick. A single accident or misstep could send many regular people’s lives into a downward spiral that ends in homelessness. That is scary. People who are scared are not in a position to have deep discussions about race and violence; they are in a position to panic and defend. If every American had a basic income to fall back on, a burden would suddenly lift from so many shoulders. Every American would have the freedom to go to school, take care of a newborn child or sick mom, take a risk in starting a business — these are things that most Americans can’t do right now, but they should be able to. Having more parents able to care for their kids, more people able to get a better education, more entrepreneurs trying new things, all these things will make our country stronger. Living a life of liberty would enable more Americans to break free from a history of fearful racism and violence.
- Encourage inclusiveness. As the space between rich and poor widens into a yawning chasm that the American middle class is falling into, it is harder and harder to talk about “we the people.” How do we find the “we” when most Americans’ lives are so very different from the oligarchs who write the rules? This divisiveness builds on and worsens the divisiveness of racism that lurks deep in the American psyche.
In contrast, giving every American a basic income would not just lift many out of poverty and desperation, it would also tell them: You belong here. You are a part of something. That message is important for both blacks and whites. Whites who are afraid there is not enough for them are more likely to try to exclude blacks from their tiny piece of turf. Whites and blacks who both feel like they belong to something bigger — like they are first and foremost Americans — will find it easier to accept each other. Giving everyone an ownership share in America is an important step towards narrowing the gaps that keep us apart and keep us fighting and killing a perceived “them” to protect a perceived “us.”
It is time.
A society that takes our Founding Fathers’ message to heart is not just one that guarantees liberty and justice for all. It values each person’s life. It affirms every person’s human rights. By valuing and protecting each person’s ability to pursue their life’s passion, a society becomes not just a nice place to live, but an incredibly innovative and abundant place driven by billions of creative individuals.
Nearly 50 years later, it is time to realize MLK’s dream. It is time to embrace a world of abundance and create a truly civilized society.
