The ever-insightful Rodger Malcolm Mitchell has a great new article about the topic of UBI from a Monetary Sovereignty perspective. Read it and share it far and wide. It needs to go VIRAL!
The only arguments against UBI are either ignorant, obsolete, greedy, selfish, patronizing, paternalistic, and/or sadistic, which means that there are really NO good arguments against it in any free and decent society worthy of the name. Period.
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Much has been made of the latest Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment run by tech CEO Sam Altman, lasting for three years beginning in 2020, and the study of the results by Eva Vivalt et al. In a nutshell, the abstract below, particularly the text in bold (emphasis ours), seems to be a sort of political and philosophical Rorschach (inkblot) test, in which we all see what we subconsciously want to see:
We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.
And there you have it. Some commenters have reacted positively to it, seeing it as a good thing, and some negatively, seeing it as a bad thing, often quite predictably based on political leanings. That said, the following comment from a libertarian perspective on the Reason article clearly wins the internet:
check out reddit.com/r/antiwork
There are large groups of people who simply think it’s unfair that they are required to work in order to feed themselves. Why should they be required to do things that society deems “useful”?
I’m in favor of UBI as a replacement for welfare. I’m in favor of single payer basic healthcare as a way of decoupling healthcare from employers.
I’m ok with one of the consequences being that some people can stop pretending to work.
The commenter, Bubba Jones, makes an excellent point there. So what if UBI results in such a modest drop in work hours and the nominal size of the labor force? A drop of merely two percentage points and 1.4 hours per week is hardly a mass exodus from the workforce, and I would hazard a guess that the lion's share of the drop is concentrated among those who are at the lower end of the bell curve and the vitality curve, that is, marginally attached workers who tend to enervate more than they energize. (Note as well that this study was done largely during the outlier years of the pandemic, so that may have biased the numbers.) And in any case, more leisure is NOT inherently a bad thing. As Robert Reich famously said, the economy exists to make our lives better, we don't exist to make the economy. This of course echoes Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative that we should always treat humanity as ends in themselves, and never solely as a means to an end.
And it dovetails nicely with the famous quote by the late, great Buckminster Fuller, the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century:
We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
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UPDATE: The ever-insightful Rodger Malcolm Mitchell has a great new article about the topic of UBI from a Monetary Sovereignty perspective. Read it and share it far and wide. It needs to go VIRAL!
Also, as the ever-insightful Marco Fioretti notes, the laws of physics ultimately demand some flavor of UBI from a limits-to-growth perspective. Thus whether you are pro-growth, anti-growth, degrowth, or agnostic about growth, all roads lead to UBI.
And finally, to clarify, the TSAP agrees with the Reddit comment IF the middle part is modified as follows:
"I’m in favor of UBI as a replacement for [cash] welfare. I’m in favor of single payer basic [comprehensive] healthcare as a way of decoupling healthcare from employers."
There, fixed it for you. And once again:
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The term "luxury beliefs" has gained quite a lot of traction since it was coined in 2019, and especially since 2022, by Rob Henderson. Per Wikipedia:
A luxury belief is an idea or opinion that confers status on members of the upper class at little cost, while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes. The term is often applied to privileged individuals who are seen as disconnected from the lived experiences of impoverished and marginalized people. Such individuals supposedly hold political and social beliefs that signal their elite status, yet which are alleged to have negative impacts on those with the least influence. Exactly what counts as a luxury belief is not always consistent and may vary from person to person, and the term in general is considered to be controversial.
Make no mistake, it is typically only (social) conservatives that have been using the term in recent years to describe their opponents' views on various hot-button issues (bail reform, criminal justice, policing, MMT, immigration, net zero, environmentalism, marriage and family, sexual freedom, reproductive rights, drug legalization and decriminalization, etc.). Occasionally the left and center-left have used the term (much more accurately, we would argue) to describe conservative beliefs like "supply-side economics", "trickle-down theory", austerity, artificial scarcity, weak or nonexistent social safety nets, and stuff like that, but the use of the term on the left in that context is relatively rare.
On the right, and even somewhat on the "third way" neoliberal left since President Clinton, there seems to be this specious idea that too much personal liberty is somehow apocalyptically worse than too little, particularly for the poor, downtrodden, and vulnerable members of society, and especially for racialized minorities (who says conservatives don't "play the race card" when it's convenient?). We argue that this is a patronizing and paternalistic attitude towards people that the talking heads (consciously or unconsciously) feel smugly superior to, and it essentially robs such people of agency. And to be blunt about it, as the saying goes, "crap always rolls downhill". That is, granted, ANY policy can have unintended consequences per Murphy's Law, and as a well-known corollary, those negative consequences tend to accrue disproportionately to those who lack the means to insulate themselves from such consequences, particularly those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. For example, in that regard, we can call the War on (people who use a few particular) Drugs just as much if not more of a "luxury belief" as full drug legalization would be in practice, as the adverse consequences (which are not entirely unintended!) fall disproportionately on poor people and/or racialized minorities.
As Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) famously said, "you can get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction". And that clearly applies tenfold to the poor as it does to the rich.
The real problem is systemic, as must any real solution be. But liberty per se is not the problem. While the utterly patronizing and paternalistic protectionism and "tyranny of the weaker brother" is the real luxury belief here, as are the economic ones like "trickle-down theory", austerity, and neoliberalism. ("Catch and release" and "defund the police" are the only ones that Henderson mentions that even come close in that regard.)
The TSAP supports liberty and justice for all, in contrast to liberty for "just us", NOT all. To quote Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies (sic) attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it". Truer words have never been spoken indeed.
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Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has been taking quite a drubbing lately. Some say it has been thoroughly discredited since it was de facto practiced (to an extent) during the pandemic, and massive inflation resulted. But that glib commentary misses the real root cause of the inflation: the shortages of goods, services, and labor resulting from the massive global supply chain disruptions, which in turn resulted from the lockdowns and related restrictions.
(And it's not entirely due to ignorance, since those naysayers actually DO admit as much about the lockdowns, but yet they still speciously put most, if not all, of the blame on MMT, because reasons.)
MMT per se was never the problem. But to refurbish it, one must admit that lockdowns and related restrictions did very real harm, something that the pseudo-left is loath to do. Not that MMT is flawless, by any means. But Rodger Malcolm Mitchell's related theory, Monetary Sovereignty (MS), essentially fixes those flaws, especially when he (belatedly) jettisoned the specious idea of interest rate hikes (which only deepened the stagflationary quagmire) as an inflation-fighting tool. A good essay about the differences between the two can be found here.
In a nutshell, when you literally shut down the broader economy in most of the world for an extended period of time (which greatly disrupts and shrinks supply), AND then try to paper over it by printing unprecedented amounts of money (which stokes demand), that WILL be inflationary. But the money printing was NOT the root cause, and remember that if the powers that be didn't do that, there would have been a full-blown depression, if not a complete collapse of civilization as we knew it, and within a couple weeks the masses would have been furiously calling for their heads with torches and pitchforks. Or, they could have simply adopted the "flu strategy" and NOT imposed any restrictions, and perhaps implemented a more modest (but more brief and front-loaded) stimulus package, and this whole stagflationary quagmire could have been avoided. And as the experience of Sweden and other countries has famously shown, it would not have resulted in any more excess deaths than occurred with lockdowns. Hindsight is quite literally 2020.
It's not that lunch cannot ever be free. It actually can be, at least to a point. But truly lockdowns can never be a free lunch, no matter how much money gets printed to paper over the massive holes they make.
As for the specious notion that MMT (and by extension, MS) is a "luxury belief", well, we know that the real luxury beliefs are austerity and artificial scarcity. Not to mention lockdowns as well.
With President Biden officially dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, and VP Kamala Harris the most likely candidate in his place, the 2024 election just got that much more interesting. This is of course right on the heels of the recent (and mysterious) assassination attempt on Trump (which we condemn, of course), which has apparently elevated him to "martyr" status among his cult-like base.
Make no mistake, this election is for ALL the marbles. And not just because the Donald has lost his marbles (he lost them long ago), but because the stakes are even higher still this time around. A vote for Trump (or a vote for any third party candidate, or not voting at all) is effectively a vote for Project 2025, the latest Republican agenda, which would lead America into Margaret Atwood's worst nightmare. What they are proposing is downright horrifying to say the least! And it is also a vote for the Trump-Putin-Xi-Kim Axis of Evil as well. Some may say that this election is essentially a choice between World War III and Civil War 2.0, but we think that Trump winning would make it that much more likely that we will get the two-for-one special, barring a miracle of miracles.
And to those who say that their vote doesn't count because it is rigged and the outcome is predetermined, keep in mind that such a thing really only happens when the election is close, and it becomes that much HARDER to cheat when the election is not close. We still haven't gone so far down the rabbit hole of kleptocracy that we have full banana republic sham elections--YET. (Though if Trump wins, he could very easily make that the case in the future.) And if everyone who was eligible to vote actually voted, Trump (and the Republicans in general) really wouldn't stand a chance.
The lesson that should have been learned in 2016: if you make the perfect the enemy of the good, we ultimately end up with neither. Seriously.
P.S. To all of the young(-ish) Trump supporting men out there who are still smug about Project 2025 because of your gender, race, etc., read the fine print. One of the things on the agenda is to bring back the military draft. Seriously. That means YOU too. So maybe you might want to reconsider which candidate, and party, you are willing to support. And to all of the Serena Joy-esque self-hating misogynists out there, who think they personally will be spared, well, remember what ultimately happens to Serena in Atwood's novel. Don't say you haven't been warned!
Like the song "Freewill" by Rush goes, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
As John Pavlovitz notes, it is no secret that today, the Fourth of July, has become a high holy day for the MAGA movement and fascists in general. And that truly is a shame. They have, essentially, culturally appropriated and turned thoroughly inside-out such an otherwise wonderful holiday celebrating our nation's hard-won independence from the British Empire, and the ideals of liberty and justice for all.
Thus we must NEVER let them have exclusive use of this day, as that is dangerous. Instead, we must reclaim it from the fascists, lest we let them win.
So what are we waiting for? Happy Birthday America! And hopefully many, many more!
The FERAL Reserve still has yet to cut interest rates, and despite the Dow Jones recently hitting 40,000, the risk of recession is apparently growing by the day. And after falling dramatically from its 2022 peak of 9% once the pandemic-induced (more like lockdown-induced) supply chain issues and shortages got resolved, inflation currently remains stubbornly stuck in the neighborhood of 3%. Because Jerome Powell is too stubborn to cut rates, thus keeping us trapped in a quagmire. Hello, stagflation!
Just pointing out that today is Flag Day. But this blog looks no different today because we display the Stars and Stripes every day.
To all the ignorant fools who burn it, remember what it is that you're really burning, and all those that fought and died for it. Those who consider themselves to be on the political left would be better served by "taking back the Flag" and waving it proudly, so it is NOT perverted into an ultra-right-wing symbol by the fascists. Make it clear that the government policies you oppose are NOT in the national interest. And let everyone know that you can just as strongly love this country as you dislike its government. In fact, plenty of true patriots often do feel that way.A friendly reminder to all readers: contrary to popular opinion, it is entirely possible to have a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Florida Alaska taxes. Why? (You really may want to sit down before reading any further.)
Because federal taxes do NOT fund federal spending, that's why! Not the individual income tax, not the corporate income tax, not FICA, not the various excises, duties, and tariffs, not estate or gift taxes, nor any other federal tax for that matter. It is all a Big Lie illusion to prop up the oligarchy, especially the big banks, via artificial scarcity of dollars. As Rodger Malcolm Mitchell famously notes, and echoed by Dr. Joseph M. Firestone, the federal government is Monetarily Sovereign, that is, being the issuer of it's own currency, it by definition has infinite money. Any money they receive, through taxes or otherwise, is effectively like bringing coals to Newcastle, in that it disappears into infinity (thus de facto destroyed). And whenever they spend money on anything, they create each dollar on an ad hoc basis to pay as they go.
Switching to what Dr. Firestone calls "Overt Congressional Financing (OCF)" is LONG overdue. On August 15, 1971, the gold standard effectively ended for good, but the method of Congressional financing remains more or less stuck in the past.
Meanwhile, the so-called "National Debt" (TM) is also an illusion, in that it consists of Treasury securities that are only spuriously linked to federal spending due to arcane and archaic rules left over from the now-defunct gold standard that ended over half a century ago. Each T-security is effectively equivalent to a CD savings account for those who choose to invest in them. Additionally, the idea that money can only be created with interest or other "strings" attached to it is yet another part of the Big Lie as well.
(It could literally be paid off in one fell swoop at zero cost to anyone, in fact. And it's technically not even "borrowing" at all. Infinite money, remember?)
Ditto for the Social Security, Medicare, and other federal "trust funds", which are literally nothing more than accounting gimmicks based on artificial scarcity. They could fund all of that and more by simply creating the money on an ad hoc basis.
As for inflation, that is generally caused by shortages of goods and services, NOT by printing too much money. It is ultimately a supply-side problem that requires supply-side solutions, including (counterintuitively) more federal spending targeted to incentivize more production of scarce goods and services. Thus, rationing dollars via austerity measures and/or raising interest rates to fight inflation and/or recession is like applying leeches to cure anemia. It is a fundamental category mistake that does far more harm than good on balance.
Of course, the oligarchs want to condition We the People to accept mere crumbs from the tables of the rich. That way they can keep widening the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots, givng the oligarchs more power to lord it over us all.
Bottom line: all of these gimmicks are completely artificial, contrived, and designed to deceive us all. The ONLY purposes of taxes in a Monetarily Sovereign government that issues it's own currency (like the federal government, but not (yet) state and local governments) are 1) to control and regulate the economy by encouraging or discouraging various behaviors and activities, 2) to (crudely) fight inflation, 3) to create demand for the currency, and 4) to prop up and give credence to the Big Lie. But the supposed need to raise revenue is NOT one of them at all.
Thus, with the stroke of a pen, Congress can very easily square the circle of a better than Nordic-style social welfare state with less than Alaska taxes, complete with a national version of the Alaska Permanent Fund. They gave the FERAL Reserve its power in 1913, and they can just as easily take it away today if they chose to. But of course, their oligarch masters would NOT want that at all! Most Congresscritters save for a tiny few, are of course bought and paid for by the big money interests. Thus, we need to throw the bums out, yesterday!
So what are we waiting for? PAGING DR. FIRESTONE! NEEDED IN WASHINGTON, DC, STAT!
In the wake of the still ongoing Israel-Gaza war following the brutal and barbaric terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel, and especially with all of the recent protests on college campuses and elsewhere, there has been an outpouring of antisemitism lately from both left and right (though largely from the regressive "left"). Some of it is ostensibly at least tangentially related to current events, while some of it is simply a "mask off" moment for longstanding hatred against Jews that has always been there but now has come to the surface now they have found a politically convenient excuse to hide behind. Either way, it is completely unacceptable. Regardless of how one may feel about current events, there is NO excuse for that sort of bigotry. Period. And the silence is truly deafening among those who should know better than to be silent in the face of it as well.
As we have said in the past, we the TSAP hereby vow to NEVER make that sort of mistake by either omission or commission, and hereby condemn antisemitism in the very strongest of terms, just as strongly as we do racism in general. And the reader is put on notice that we will NEVER tolerate any overt or covert antisemitism in our party, period, no matter how much one tries (in vain, by definition) to dress it up in any sort of leftist or social justice rhetoric. Bigotry by any other name still stinks.
Therefore, using any of the following red flag words, phrases, or references will get your comments promptly deleted, and severe and/or repeat offenders will be banned permanently:"Big Tech is the new Big Tobacco" is often bandied about these days. And while that has a kernel of truth to it (a kernel the size of a cornfield, in fact), it is also used by authoritarian zealots with a very illiberal (and ageist) agenda. Mandatory age verification, censorship, repealing Section 230, and other related illiberal restrictions would open up the door to many unintended consequences to privacy, cybersecurity, and civil rights and liberties in general. Even those adults who don't support youth rights will eventually experience these consequences sooner or later. Kafka, meet trap. Pandora, meet box. Albatross, meet neck. And of course, baby, meet bathwater.
And none of these things will actually solve the collective action problem of Big Tech and the "Social Dilemma". But here are some things that will, in descending order of priority and effectiveness:
The first two items on the list in particular would of course be vehemently opposed by Big Tech. That's because their whole business model depends on creepy surveillance advertising and creepy algorithms, and thus incentivizing addiction for profit. They would thus have to switch to the (gasp!) DuckDuckGo model if these items were done. (Plays world's smallest violin) That would of course be tantamount to throwing the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, in J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
For another, related collective action problem, what about the emerging idea of phone-free schools? Fine, but to be fair, how about phone-free workplaces for all ages as well? In both cases, it should ONLY apply while "on the clock", which for school would be best defined as being from the opening bell to the final bell of the day, as well as during any after-school detention time. And of course, in both cases, there would have to be medical exemptions for students and employees who need such devices for real-time medical monitoring (glucose for diabetes, for example). Surely productivity would increase so much as a result that we could easily shorten the standard workweek to 30-32 hours per week (8 hours for 4 days, or 6 hours for 5 days) with no loss in profits? But that would make too much sense.
Other good ideas we would endorse are a voluntary smartphone buyback program (similar to gun buybacks), and perhaps even paying people to voluntarily delete or deactivate their social media accounts for a time. That would accomplish far more than any realistic mandatory measures would.
Another possible idea is simply to slow down by design the pace of these social media platforms. Much like #OneClickSafer mentioned above, adding a little bit of friction to an otherwise frictionless system can help tame the very real dark side of that system. I mean, would you willingly drive on a frictionless surface (such as ice)? Of course you wouldn't.
Note that internet connection speeds are more than ten times faster (!) today on average than in 2010. That leaves a LOT of room for adding back friction!
And finally, the idea of banning certain questionable design features (infinite scroll, autoplay, etc.) may be controversial in terms of whether such features are protected by the First Amendment, but we believe that those features per se are not automatically protected, unless the ban is deliberately abused to censor specific content. If such bans are truly content-neutal, we are fine with that.
We must remember that, at the end of the day, Big Tech is NOT our friend. But neither are the illiberal control freak zealots. These measures that we endorse will actually make both sides quite angry indeed. But truly that's a feature, not a bug.
Big Tech can go EFF off!
(Updated from the 2023 version)
The current draft of the WHO pandemic treaty is very close to being finalized now. And while the "fact checkers" vociferously deny that the treaty will sign over America's hard-won national sovereignty to the WHO in the event of a future global health emergency, there is still good reason for all nations, and especially the USA, to refuse to sign, ratify, OR accede to it until serious revisions are made.
First, the constitutionally questionable practice of it possibly even going into effect without the Senate's "advice and consent" (as is typically required to ratify international treaties), let alone the utterly specious notion that treaties can even supersede the Constitution itself, is enough to give anyone a severe case of the heebie-jeebies, or at least any serious student of history that gives a crap about the Constitution. That alone is bad enough.
But the most important problem of all, is what the treaty, by omission, does NOT require of its signatories. The following is what we believe any such treaty absolutely MUST require explicitly, in light of the three year "free" trial of authoritarianism (and often totalitarianism) from 2020-2023:
To be prohibited in any circumstances:
Definitions:
From ecological overshoot to all of its attendant crises, including climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and mass extinction, along with the current global energy crisis, the idea of "degrowth" (i.e. a deliberate and planned shrinking of the economy) may seem like an appealing alternative in some circles. However, not only is it a political nonstarter, but the level of central planning and austerity required would ultimately do more harm than good, get us permanently stuck in a bad place, and we would still end up destroying the Earth in the end (albeit a bit more slowly, compared to business as usual). It would "flatten the curve", of course, but really just drag it out and prolong the pain without solving the problem. In other words, it would basically be like Covid lockdown, only permanently, though hopefully minus all of the antisocial distancing and ocean-killing masks. And we saw what a disaster that was, with the Global South faring the very worst in terms of collateral damage.
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"Limbic capitalism" is the term of art given to the phenomenon by which Big Business deliberately engineers addiction to various products and services to encourage more consumption, and therefore more profit. It is an externality-generating practice that is ultimately a collective action problem at base. We currently see it in practically everything from Big Tobacco to Big Tech to Big Media to Big Food to Big Booze to Big Pharma to Big Oil to Big Casino and so on, all the way up to and including Wall Street, the world's largest casino of all. And of course, the only true and complete solution to end limbic capitalism for good is to end capitalism itself completely.
After all, it's all part of the same general addiction at base: i.e. growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host.
That said, partial solutions can still be worthwhile, and we should not let the Nirvana Fallacy paralyze us in that regard. Ending capitalism itself completely is a lot easier said than done, or at the very least is NOT a particularly quick process. Thus, in the meantime, one "low-hanging fruit" measure to take is to pass a broad law that makes it categorically illegal to deliberately, and for no legitimate purpose, design a product or service to be more addictive than it would otherwise be. That would of course include wilfully adding any gratuitous and questionable additives or features that cannot otherwise be legitimately justified. That would of course include a wide range of troublesome food additives, and of course practically all tobacco additives a fortiori, but also the more subtle things such as curated "addictive feeds", "infinite scroll", and "frictionless sharing" on social media, and various blatantly gambling-like features built into some MMO video games as well.
Some things are of course naturally or inherently addictive (to one degree or another) in themselves, granted. And humans are wired to seek such things out, thanks in part to our evolutionary baggage. But there is NO justifiable or redeeming reason at all to deliberately make such things MORE addictive than they would otherwise be, for the sake of filthy lucre.
Of course, at the same time, we would also still be wise to heed Lysander Spooner's famous and timeless maxim: vices are not crimes. We ignore such a crucial distinction at our peril, as history has shown.
Back in 2017, there was an article in The Week by Damon Linker titled, "The Spiritual Ruin of a Universal Basic Income". He basically argues that it is a Very Bad Idea for the left to pursue the idea of a UBI because 1) it fails to address (and perhaps even intensifies) the psychological and spiritual consequences of joblessness, which are (in his view) distinct from and worse than the economic consequences, 2) most people couldn't handle joblessness even with a basic income, and would thus become depressed and purposeless and give themselves over to video games, porn, and/or drug addiction, and 3) the left should not concede that automation (and the resulting job losses) is in any way inevitable. Because reasons, obviously.
And all of these things are in fact false. (Or to be exceedingly charitable, highly subjective at best.)We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.Thus, on balance, a Universal Basic Income Guarantee for all is a good idea regardless. A win-win-win situation for everyone but the oligarchs. And the only real arguments against it are selfish, patronizing, paternalistic, and/or sadistic ones, which really means there are NO good arguments against it in a free and civilized society. So what are we waiting for?
"Catch and release" of criminals is literally one of the very dumbest policies in all of recorded history, right up there with "defund the police" and similar half-baked ideas. And the results of such no-accountability de facto tacit decriminalization of crimes big and small have sadly been predictable.
Only the most dyed-in-the-wool, super left-brained (and hare-brained), out-of-touch, ivory-tower academics and their acolytes could possibly think that such a real-life, literal "get out of jail free card" is somehow a good idea on balance. People can argue "root cause theory" till they are blue in the face, but that does NOT somehow negate the non-root causes that clearly need to be tackled as well. It's NOT an either/or situation, and clearly most of the root causes of crime are much harder and slower to solve. Forest, meet trees. And map, meet territory.
Also, as much as we loathe victimless crime laws, per the late, great Peter McWilliams, author of Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Society, that does NOT somehow imply a lax attitude towards real crimes (whether big or small, violent or not) that objectively harm (or unduly endanger) the person or property of nonconsenting others, or that otherwise violate the civil or human rights of others. In other words, "Get tough on REAL crime" should really be the appropriate slogan here, something even the Libertarian Party has long agreed with.
(That is precisely where we at the TSAP decidedly part ways with the late criminologist James Q. Wilson, the main proponent of the "broken windows" theory, who we otherwise at least partially agree with. In any case, the "broken windows" theory was ultimately inspired by the late sociologist Jane Jacobs.)
The TSAP has long compiled a list of promising ideas called "Smart On Crime", that should be food for thought indeed. And guess what it does NOT include? Catch and release, defund the police, or anything of the sort. Focused deterrence actually does work, and these latest silly "new" (old) fads only monkeywrench and vitiate such a proven crime-fighting strategy.
The one major city that bucked the disastrous trend recently was Dallas, Texas. And not only did they NOT defund the police, they actually increased the use of smart policing tactics to target violent and serious crime. And whaddya know, it worked. So let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater now!
The TSAP has once endorsed the MMT idea of a Job Guarantee (JG), which is exactly what it sounds like. Of course, we also supported Universal Basic Income (UBI) with NO strings attached as well for years now, but still maintained that a JG would be good in addition to that. However, we no longer support that idea anymore. JG, in all of its flavors, has far too many conceptual, logistical, and ontological problems to be workable at scale, as Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes in his article, and several others.
So what do we at the TSAP support instead of JG? Well, we clearly support UBI, hands down. But beyond that, we support a scaled-up version of something like Job Corps, and which is basically a Job Guarantee but without the "guarantee" part. That is, simply a jobs program, both for finding and creating jobs as needed, and one that provides only useful work rather than the Sisyphean make-work boondoggles that would inevitably occur in a true JG program. Otherwise, it is guaranteed to fail.
