The 'Monsters, Inc.' Argument for Unconditional Basic Income

[yallerdawg]

"We didn’t abolish slavery as an institution. We simply went from one form of slavery (chattel slavery), to another form of slavery (wage slavery)."


Source: Medium, by Scott Santens

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'Monsters, Inc.' takes place in a universe that literally runs on fear. Monsters enter the human world at night through bedroom closets to scare children for the purpose of energy production. You see, whereas the world we know mostly runs on fossil fuels, hydropower, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind, the world of monsters runs on the emotion of fear. When kids scream, their screams are harvested as energy. That energy powers a world of monsters. And so every night, monsters enter the world of humans, to make children scream, to mine their fear.

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Believe it or not, we live in that same kind of world. We discovered something monstrous that works, and we use it to drive our economy. We’ve done it for so long, we don’t even question it, and we never even tested a far more powerful alternative. What works we discovered is an economy based on the fear of death by poverty, where fear of death is used to compel people into working, and what we never tested (until recently that is) is an economy where there is no fear of death by poverty, where all work is thus fully voluntary.

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Think of it this way. One method of forcing someone to do something is to physically choke them. If they do what you want, you stop choking them. If they don’t do what you want, you keep choking them until they do. The other method involves gaining control over all the air, and then telling people that if they do what you want, you’ll give them pieces of paper that they can use to pay for air. If they don’t do what you want, you don’t give them any access to air until they do. Both involve the restricting of air supplies. Both are based on the fear of death by asphyxiation. Both involve choices where the choice is life or death, which isn’t really a choice at all. Both are forms of domination, but one is direct, and the other is indirect.

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We can create a world that runs on joy instead of fear. We can choose to do that. We can choose to remove the guns pointed at everyone’s heads, and in so doing liberate everyone with the freedom to voluntarily pursue whatever pursuits they find most meaningful. All that’s required is to abolish the fear of death by poverty. Unconditional basic income does that.

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Read it all at: https://medium.com/basic-income/the-monsters-inc-argument-for-unconditional-basic-income-3b22b63eed3e

[guillaumeb]

1. Recommended.

Some will argue that the US cannot "afford" a universal basic income.

I would argue that the US cannot afford to not have one.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

2. Beautiful thread

Was great to see it. It should be pinned to the greatest page.