Basic Income

he is not tackling the real problem because he doesn't have a clue what it is. The pursuit of full employment is a ludicrous task; he and we have to face the fact that in the modern world there will never be full employment again, and we should welcome this as a good thing. This means that as Major Douglas said, the dividend must progressively replace the wage/salary as a form of purchasing power, in short there must be a Basic Income for all. Unless and until we recognise this instead of pursuing policies that amount to the persecution of those less fortunate than ourselves through workfare and similar crackpot schemes, we are sewing the seeds for more social unrest.

Unless and until IDS and his masters acknowledge this simple truth, neither he nor they will make any progress solving the real problems facing especially the poor but increasingly even graduates in the 21st Century western world, and other advanced nations like Japan. Namely, the distribution of purchasing power, not the creation of work for work's sake or the bludgeoning of the underprivileged into workfare or similar schemes.

People who sit on the boards of companies lead extremely comfortable lives, the work they do hardly counts as work, and their remuneration is legendary. 

More recently, America has produced its own original Social Credit advocate. Like Major Douglas, James Albus was an engineer. In 1976, Albus, who died last year, published People's Capitalism: THE ECONOMICS OF THE ROBOT REVOLUTION, in which he advocated a similar solution to distribute the fruits of society's labours to all and sundry. Although he used different terminology, there is not a cent's worth of difference between the National Dividend advocated by Major Douglas and the National Mutual Fund of James Albus.

governments would rather spend a million dollars to create one job than pay the unemployed and theunemployable any sort of Basic Income as a right.

Unemployable means literally that; advances in technology mean that large tranches of people are literally unable to find employment that will pay them a living wage. Let us take the case of a newspaper seller; for argument's sake we will call him Ian Tomlinson. Although he had a family, at the time of his death he was living in a hostel for the homeless and eking out a few coppers by distributing a newspaper. He was also an alcoholic. It is fair to say that a man who has fallen so far down the ladder cannot earn a living wage. In the 19th Century, yes, even at some point in the 20th after a fashion, but as technology advances, men who have drink problems and no marketable skills are not in high demand, and are likely to be even less so with the next release of Windows. Nor are those with other problems such as serious mental health issues or criminal records any more employable, although there is always room for the dishonourable exception.
The collective psychosis of full employment has been and continues to be disastrous for such people, young and old, and of course the older they get, the less employable they become. We see the result of this collective psychosis in our inner cities everyday, where it is interpreted as institutional racism, social deprivation, or some other chimera. Major Douglas and his acolytes have shown us the way forward: a Social Credit, National Dividend or Basic Income is the common cultural inheritance of us all.

There is one and only one alternative to Social Credit. We can see this already in a society increasingly polarised between the haves and the have-nots. In the future, automation will cripple those taxpayers who survive, while the main source of new employment will be for apparatchiks of the emerging total surveillance state, including as police officers, and jailers for those who are denied the right to livelihood through no fault of their own.