Eighth Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network
Paul D. Fernhout
http://www.usbig.net/
"The basic income guarantee (BIG) is a government insured guarantee that no
citizen's income will fall below some minimal level for any reason. All
citizens would receive a BIG without means test or work requirement. BIG is
an efficient and effective solution to poverty that preserves individual
autonomy and work incentives while simplifying government social policy.
Some researchers estimate that a small BIG, sufficient to cut the poverty
rate in half could be financed without an increase in taxes by redirecting
funds from spending programs and tax deductions aimed at maintaining
incomes. Click here for more information."
I've mentioned that conference here before. I'm not going myself, but I am
pointing it out to show how others are trying hard to envision alternative
economics even within our current economic framework.
Alaska already has something like this, where all citizens receive an annual
check (in the $1000 range) from a trust fund connected to Alaska's oil wealth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
They also have no state income or sales tax:
http://www.bankrate.com/yho/itax/edit/state/profiles/state_tax_Aka.asp
"Alaska is the only state that does not collect state sales tax or levy an
individual income tax. To finance state operations, Alaska depends primarily
on petroleum revenues. Some of its cities and other local jurisdictions,
however, do collect sales tax revenue."
So, even within the USA, alternatives are possible.
One example title of a talk from today: "Jeffery J. Smith, BIG In Pocket,
Who Needs a Bailout? Myths and Realities".
--Paul Fernhout
Nathan Cravens
Samantha Atkins
;)---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Paul D. Fernhout <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 7:34 AM
Subject: [Open Manufacturing] Eighth Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network
To: openmanu...@googlegroups.com
This conference starts today in New York City:
http://www.usbig.net/
"The basic income guarantee (BIG) is a government insured guarantee that no
citizen's income will fall below some minimal level for any reason. All
citizens would receive a BIG without means test or work requirement. BIG is
an efficient and effective solution to poverty that preserves individual
autonomy and work incentives while simplifying government social policy.
Some researchers estimate that a small BIG, sufficient to cut the poverty
rate in half could be financed without an increase in taxes by redirecting
funds from spending programs and tax deductions aimed at maintaining
incomes. Click here for more information."
Nick Taylor
> Insured how? It can only be insured by the government directly taking
> from some and giving to others at this stage in human capabilities.
> Whether the taking is direct or indirect by massive debt pushing the
> taking into the future is immaterial. Remember that governments don't
> produce anything really.
>
> Now in an Abundance economy I would support this wholeheartedly. But
> not where we are.
Look at it as an investment in people.
What are the costs of having huge swathes of the population that are
essentially worthless? Who live in neighbourhoods where the only people
hiring are the drugs-trade?
Paul D. Fernhout
> Insured how? It can only be insured by the government directly taking
> from some and giving to others at this stage in human capabilities.
> Whether the taking is direct or indirect by massive debt pushing the
> taking into the future is immaterial. Remember that governments
> don't produce anything really.
>
> Now in an Abundance economy I would support this wholeheartedly. But
> not where we are.
Governments may take from all but give back more than they take to all if
the resources are invested wisely in collective efforts with big returns
where these big projects benefit everyone and future generations to some
degree. For example, research on curing common diseases may have big payoffs
in better health for just about everyone, or a bold space program might
inspire people and have other spinoffs, or the development of communications
tools like the internet can increase overall efficiency, or eventually the
development of advanced manufacturing may provide all with abundance. So,
redistribution is only one aspect of taxation to some ends, not the only
aspect. There are many important projects that companies in the market place
are simply unwilling to invest in because of large scale or higher perceived
risk or the need to look at long time horizons. Taxes may also reduce costs
in other areas -- like universal health care might help in preventing
plagues by keeping everyone more fit and disease resistant.
Actually there are several other sources of revenue than direct taxation of
income.
* The expansion of the money supply. This is printing money, but, if the
amount printed correlates with the amount needed, there is no inflation.
This is potentially trillions of dollars a year right now, mostly just given
to bankers for free.
* Sale of government assets (the US government holds about 1/3 of the land
in the country).
* Lease of government assets (either real estate, or more nebulous things
like broadcast spectrum or government-sponsored research results).
* Fees for services (like the USPTO, which unfortunately have been siphoned
off into the general fund, leaving that organization underfunded). In
theory, by the value of centralization, standardization, and mass
production, the government can run some services far more efficiently than
private business (which wastes money in competition and incompatible standards).
* Fines (especially for negative externalities like oil spills). The
opposite of a fine is a subsidy (for positive externalities like creating
jobs and getting people off welfare, or for reducing pollution of the
environment) -- but subsides are not revenue providing, but still, if they
encourage more good stuff than they cost in money, there is a net social profit.
* Import and export duties (which one might term a tax, but they are a
little different in some ways because they deal with the interface to the
rest of the world, not internal transactions, and they were a major means of
support of the US government the first hundred years).
* Profits from government run businesses (often involving government
assets). This is how places like Russia or Venezuela are getting so much
money, mostly from nationalized oil companies. But there are other
businesses the government could run (the post office is a sort-of example,
as is the Federal Reserve, since in theory any profits of it go to the
Treasury).
And if you are going to tax, there are a lot of possible taxes, each with
different implications -- transaction taxes like sales taxes, wealth taxes
like property taxes, income taxes, head taxes (per person, sometimes to
vote) and monopoly taxes (like taxing copyrights annually at their estimated
worth).
There may be other revenue sources too. There is a list here:
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
Remember, "wealth" imposes a burden on society, requiring police forces for
domestic defense of wealth, armies for foreign defense, prisons for those
who would threaten that order of things, human suffering from work and from
lack of access to centralized capital and from a lack of an ability to
participate in the market, chilling effects from related monopolies
(patents, copyrights, charters, exclusive leases of government assets,
etc.), the need for infrastructure for wealthy to enjoy the wealth,
invasions of privacy to increase the security of the ultra-wealthy in a
world of an increasing rich-poor divide, schools to indoctrinate children
into accepting a rich-poor disparity, a court system to enforce contracts
and often allow justice to be purchased by the wealthy, a regulated banking
system to maintain a money supply including huge government bailouts as we
are seeing now to keep the wealthy from not being wealthy after bubbles
burst or other market failures, and so on. So, "wealth" (especially in terms
of a wide rich-poor disparity) is not cost-free to society. See also:
"The mythology of wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
Of all these, the increase in the money supply is the least painless in some
ways to fund things, and tapping it is the basis of some social credit
ideas, since it is inflation-free if done right. Even now, vast amounts of
money are essentially being created (trillions of dollars for the bailout),
and we see no inflation. But that's only one approach of the many listed
above. In the past, civilizations have also had non-monetary based
taxations, like compulsory labor, like one year out of seven in the fields
or working on pyramids and such, in return for various government benefits
like guaranteed food supply. I'd probably have been happy to have started my
career worked for the government as a programmer on health care systems for
a few years out of school with minimal college-like housing in exchange for
a lifetime of, say, health-care. Many countries now have that in relation to
military service, but that is not the only approach to it.
So, there are lots of possibilities, even from where we are right now.
--Paul Fernhout
Samantha Atkins
Well, if they are *essentially* worthless than no matter how much
money you poor on it would not help. If you just more in money and
do nothing else then the drug dealers and such get much of it. Some
of the Great Society ideas also showed that money alone solves nothing
in quality of life terms and can actually make it worse and lock in
generational patterns. Now I don't think many people are
irredeemably "worthless" although the cost to raise some out of the
current pit they inhabit may be too high for the likely result achieved.
In any case if this is a win proposition then I don't think you need
to take the money to do it by force of arms (the law) from others to
fund it.
- samantha
Samantha Atkins
On Feb 27, 2009, at 5:12 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
>
> Samantha Atkins wrote (about BIG):
>> Insured how? It can only be insured by the government directly
>> taking
>> from some and giving to others at this stage in human capabilities.
>> Whether the taking is direct or indirect by massive debt pushing the
>> taking into the future is immaterial. Remember that governments
>> don't produce anything really.
>>
>> Now in an Abundance economy I would support this wholeheartedly. But
>> not where we are.
>
> Governments may take from all but give back more than they take to
> all if
> the resources are invested wisely in collective efforts with big
> returns
> where these big projects benefit everyone and future generations to
> some
> degree.
This is not historically what has happened. And there are very deep
systemic reasons why it should not be expected.
> For example, research on curing common diseases may have big payoffs
> in better health for just about everyone, or a bold space program
> might
> inspire people and have other spinoffs, or the development of
> communications
> tools like the internet can increase overall efficiency, or
> eventually the
> development of advanced manufacturing may provide all with abundance.
All of those are not that difficult to fund privately, especially if
not too much is being raked off by government and the economy is not
spiraling into the ash heap. When government says it is going to do
any of these the result has been quite different again and again. How
much evidence is enough to consider letting the government do it a bad
idea and move on?
> So,
> redistribution is only one aspect of taxation to some ends, not the
> only
> aspect. There are many important projects that companies in the
> market place
> are simply unwilling to invest in because of large scale or higher
> perceived
> risk or the need to look at long time horizons. Taxes may also
> reduce costs
> in other areas -- like universal health care might help in preventing
> plagues by keeping everyone more fit and disease resistant.
>
They are unwilling under current government takes of their profits,
irregular rules about everywhere they deal with government and a very
broken economy. In the days of smaller government many private
companies had large R&D outlays and commonly penned decades long
contracts. Ask yourself what changed and why.
If you think health care cost is high now wait until you see what
government does with it. Look at Medicare. Look at the recent Drug
plan. Look at the bills already proposed to have government dictate
what kind of care is and is not available on the way to so-called
Universal Care.
> Actually there are several other sources of revenue than direct
> taxation of
> income.
>
> * The expansion of the money supply. This is printing money, but, if
> the
> amount printed correlates with the amount needed, there is no
> inflation.
> This is potentially trillions of dollars a year right now, mostly
> just given
> to bankers for free.
>
This is inflationary as hell sooner or later. That it isn't right at
this moment does not mean you can get away with printing so-called
wealth out of thin air.
> * Sale of government assets (the US government holds about 1/3 of
> the land
> in the country).
>
I believe it is close to 50% but yeah. Unfortunately the Chinese may
buy it up to get rid of their increasingly questionable huge dollar
reserves.
> * Lease of government assets (either real estate, or more nebulous
> things
> like broadcast spectrum or government-sponsored research results).
>
Broadcast spectrum should no longer belong to the government at all.
Modern equipment makes much of the original excuse for its parceling
obsolete. Having government do did not make a lot of sense even
under the old assumptions.
Government research has already been paid for by the people and should
not be considered government property.
> * Fees for services (like the USPTO, which unfortunately have been
> siphoned
> off into the general fund, leaving that organization underfunded). In
> theory, by the value of centralization, standardization, and mass
> production, the government can run some services far more
> efficiently than
> private business (which wastes money in competition and incompatible
> standards).
>
Oh yes, centralization has worked miracles. Not. The government has
a long history of inferior services compared to private ones when
private ones have been allowed to exist.
> * Fines (especially for negative externalities like oil spills). The
> opposite of a fine is a subsidy (for positive externalities like
> creating
> jobs and getting people off welfare, or for reducing pollution of the
> environment) -- but subsides are not revenue providing, but still,
> if they
> encourage more good stuff than they cost in money, there is a net
> social profit.
>
The concept of fines in order to fund putatively good things is
abhorrent on the face of it.
> * Import and export duties (which one might term a tax, but they are a
> little different in some ways because they deal with the interface
> to the
> rest of the world, not internal transactions, and they were a major
> means of
> support of the US government the first hundred years).
Right. In a down economy impose import/export duties. Go look what
happened when that was tried at the beginning of the last
Depression. A really bad idea. When the government was very small
in the first 100 years a very small excise was sufficient to fund it.
If you want to make government that small again then I will support
that endeavor 100%. But that is very much against most of what you
have talked about here.
>
> * Profits from government run businesses (often involving government
> assets). This is how places like Russia or Venezuela are getting so
> much
> money, mostly from nationalized oil companies. But there are other
> businesses the government could run (the post office is a sort-of
> example,
> as is the Federal Reserve, since in theory any profits of it go to the
> Treasury).
>
Russia and Venezuela are not capitalistic or nearly as free. The
post office is inferior to private offerings. The Federal Reserve is
a private consortium of banks despite the name.
OK. I haven't the time or patience to untangle that pile of
misconceptions and worse.
>
> Of all these, the increase in the money supply is the least painless
> in some
> ways to fund things, and tapping it is the basis of some social credit
> ideas, since it is inflation-free if done right.
Watch what happens. It will be truly hideous. I wish it was not.
- samantha
Paul D. Fernhout
I agree with the general sentiment, but unfortunately, automation and
improving software is making most people "worthless" from a market economics
point of view (even those with lots of college degrees who are "hard
workers" in mainstream industries). We can see this already in Detroit. I
feel the current economic crisis has much deeper roots than are being
discussed. It comes on top of decades of erosion of the economic value of
labor relative to automation (and capital). I don't feel those jobs are
coming back in the USA. Some jobs, perhaps, will be created in greening
technologies or some other advanced industries (like making iPhones). But
not "full employment" in any sense, in a country already saturated with
artificial advertising-driven needs and bulging at the seems with physical
and material obesity. Offshoring is part of that, but it is just slowing the
inevitable drive to automation and a race to the bottom (since machines can
work dirt cheap). A recent article:
"We're on the brink of disaster: Violent protests and riots are breaking
out everywhere as economies collapse and governments fail. War is bound to
follow."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/02/26/klare/
"Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall
and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred.
Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia),
Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Vladivostok
(Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome and
Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising
unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the
presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at
these locations -- none as yet in the United States -- your map would
already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman,
it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and
orange pins."
As I've said before, the educated people are still there, the factories are
still there, the tools are still there, the power plants are still there,
the raw materials are still there, and so on, so why is everybody falling
into poverty and rioting? The ideology and related control system has
failed. If that happened to your car, you'd have the malfunctioning
computers reprogrammed and be back on the road the same day, rather than
take a sledge hammer to the windshield and engine.
Some (informed) future speculation by Marshall Brain:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm
"The effect that the robotic explosion had on the employment landscape was
startling. By 2030, most large retailers were replacing human employees with
robots as fast as they could. The robots stocked the shelves, swept the
floors, helped customers with questions and carried the customers' purchases
out to their cars. Every fast food restaurant was doing the same thing.
Construction sites started to switch to robots for every repetitive task:
framing, siding, roofing, painting, etc. Robotic cars and trucks took to the
highways and accident rates started to decline. It was easy to see that the
completely robotic airport, amusement park, grocery store and factory were
on the way. The switchover to robots was proceeding with remarkable speed,
and for some reason it seemed like no one had really thought about the
effects of the transition. All of these people being replaced by the robots
needed some form of income to survive, but the job pool was shrinking. The
American "service economy" was what replaced the "factory economy", and
America now had about half of its workers wrapped up in low-paying service
sector jobs. These were the jobs perfectly suited for the new robots. The
question was, what would happen to the half of the population being
displaced from their service sector jobs?"
It has happened before in the USA:
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/R_Casestudy5.htm
"Blacks did not lose their foothold in the auto industry, but their fortunes
were greatly affected by two major changes in auto production beginning in
the immediate post-World War II years. First, auto manufacturers began to
decentralize production, building new plants in suburban and rural areas,
increasingly in the South. Many of the suburban and rural areas in the North
had minuscule black populations--and thus heavily white workforces. And
until the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, most southern
plants practiced overt racial segregation, shutting out blacks altogether or
creating separate, segregated seniority lines. At the same time, many auto
manufacturers introduced new "automated" technologies, designed to reduce
the number of unskilled workers on assembly lines. Because blacks were
overrepresented in the ranks of entry-level and unskilled workers, they bore
the brunt of the job loss associated with automation. The great irony of
postwar auto industry history was that just as blacks found themselves on
the first rung of the ladder of economic mobility in the auto industry, that
rung was cut away by decentralization and automation."
Well, everyone of any skin color are the new "Blacks" when it comes to
universal automation. I guess if few people cared much about helping such
displaced workers then, why should anyone care what happens to the rest of
the country (or world) now? Really, if anyone cares, it has to be us
(meaning every person, yet working together). Again from Manna:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna4.htm
"I know what you are saying. I try not to think about it. But it's not that
unusual. Over the course of history, billions of people have lived this way.
Think back to when you were living in suburbia. Your parents had a 3,000
square foot house and the pool at the turn of the century. You were living
it up. Unfortunately, at that moment in history, there were billions of
people around the world living in poverty -- they were living off a dollar
or two per day. Meanwhile, your family had 300 dollars a day. Did you do
anything about it? Billions and Billions of people living in third-world
countries, squatting together in the dirt, crapping in ditches. They would
walk down by the river just like we are doing right now and say to each
other, 'There must be a way out.' They could see that they were lost --
totally wasted human potential trapped in a terrible situation. Their kids
and their kids' kids forever would live like this because there was
absolutely no way out. Did anyone stop to help them? Did you stop to help
them? No. You were too busy splashing in the pool. Those billions of people
lived and died in incredible poverty and no one cared."
(Though with that said, many societies poor in material things may be rich
in social and natural and spiritual things.)
I listed before all the current professions facing robotic competition with
links to current robots or software doing something like that job right now:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72330a22bcae8928?
"Check out clerks? Cab drivers? Heart Surgeons? Airline pilots? Nurses?
Entertainer? Athlete? Migrant agricultural labor? Librarian? Artist?
Designer? Miner? Writer?"
All those professions have automated versions being developed.
If we delay social and economic reforms to the point in twenty or so years
where we have these anticipated advanced robots in wide use able to
outperform most humans, especially self-guided robots in military roles
usable to enforce scarcity-based ideology without moral qualms, I'd suggest
it will be way too late to do much about most (or all) humans being deemed
surplus and worthless. We need to change the definition of human "worth"
from one based mostly on marketplace value, and we need to do it sooner than
later IMHO. (And while we're at it, we need to think of these future
intelligent robots as other than slaves, and having an inherent worth too,
otherwise that's going to end badly for other reasons.)
Here is near to the state of the art now in manipulation planning and
laser-ranging "vision":
http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/research
"Radu Bogdan Rusu of TU München and Ioan Alexandru Sucan of Rice University
have been working hard at Willow Garage the past several weeks as part of
our winter internship program. One of their projects was to do dynamic
obstacle avoidance (replanning) with a 7-DOF PR2 prototype arm using
real-time 3D mapping coupled with sampling-based motion planning. Radu's 3D
perception pipeline processes the data received from the Hokuyo laser sensor
in real-time, with continuous map updates every 20-50ms. This map is sent to
Ioan's sampling-based motion planning pipeline, which monitors the execution
of the current plan. If the current path is no longer valid, a new one is
computed. If no safe path is found, the arm is stopped until a safe path can
be computed. Computation of a new path usually takes 10-100 ms, depending on
the density of the map. In the video, the PR2's task is to move its 7-DOF
arm from left to right, changing its goal every 10 seconds -- it tries to go
left for 10 seconds, then it tries to go right for 10 seconds."
Twenty years from now, will that robot look as antiquated to us as a
Commodore 64 looks to us now compared to a MacBook?
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
>>> not where we are.
>>
>> Look at it as an investment in people.
>>
>> What are the costs of having huge swathes of the population that are
>> essentially worthless? Who live in neighbourhoods where the only
>> people
>> hiring are the drugs-trade?
>
> Well, if they are *essentially* worthless than no matter how much
> money you poor on it would not help.
Freudian slip?
How do you know it wouldn't help? Any actual empirical evidence?
If you look at different approaches to social spending around the world,
what is producing the best results?
And what makes you think doing the opposite will produce better results?
> If you just more in money and do nothing else then the drug dealers
> and such get much of it. Some of the Great Society ideas also
> showed that money alone solves nothing in quality of life terms and
> can actually make it worse and lock in generational patterns. Now
> I don't think many people are irredeemably "worthless" although the
> cost to raise some out of the current pit they inhabit may be too
> high for the likely result achieved.
Free market fundamentalist as well by any chance?
Nick
Nathan Cravens
> What are the costs of having huge swathes of the population that are
> essentially worthless? Who live in neighbourhoods where the only
> people
> hiring are the drugs-trade?
Well, if they are *essentially* worthless than no matter how much
money you poor on it would not help. If you just more in money and
do nothing else then the drug dealers and such get much of it. Some
of the Great Society ideas also showed that money alone solves nothing
in quality of life terms and can actually make it worse and lock in
generational patterns.
How products/services are produced and where needs to come into the picture before scripting monetary policy or else the "good money" turns nil.
I assume if most products are produced in a country with a Basic Income, that country will be fine materially. Even spending BI generated money in a non-BI adopting country the money will still be good, granted the country can produce mostly for itself.
This is not to say by default that "money will buy happiness" or that material abundance will ensure an educated and innovative populace. Yet, if a semantic web interface is available "everywhere," with a great deal of boredom in the chain, these products of an effortless economy can increase self worth by making "something," to in turn increase a sense of accomplishment and self expression that "riding the system" cannot do in itself.
An interview with John Smart comes to mind.
http://singinst.org/media/interviews/johnsmart
When government says it is going to do
any of these the result has been quite different again and again. How
much evidence is enough to consider letting the government do it a bad
idea and move on?
I agree. If a majority of the populace passively lets a regulatory agent, a state government or otherwise, make decisions, the benefits of these decisions will mostly go to those with the most interest, currently based on minority ownership rights of production.
If you think health care cost is high now wait until you see what
government does with it. Look at Medicare. Look at the recent Drug
plan. Look at the bills already proposed to have government dictate
what kind of care is and is not available on the way to so-called
Universal Care.
In the U.S., the way health care produces health care needs some examination and restructuring to become less wasteful than it is. Many European countries provide a model the U.S. can adopt. Bankruptcy and consequent government ownership may be what it takes before health care is improved.
***
I look forward to making this proposal: print the money without taxation. Richard Cook has already made this proposal in 'Bailout for the People'. Of course we will need to be more aware of the "means of production" the Open Manufacturing / Hardware groups are apart to ensure money remains able to provide at least a "basic" standard of living.
Here are at least two BI sources to consider:
An audio interview by James Hughes with Richard Cook on Monetary Reform and Basic Income
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/csr20090124b/
A Bailout for the People: Dividend Economics and the Basic Income Guarantee
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/bailout-for-the-people-the-cook-plan-by-richard-c-cook-2/
I cite Cook's views because he understands monetary policy and the history of debt where others in BI do not. His argument for moving forward with a BI is the most grounded argument I've found in BI so far.
I don't agree completely with Cook's proposal in regard to restricting monetary rights by age or by restricting a money's ability to purchase products like alcohol. Ideal social conditions for a BI would increase responsibility expectations for younger ages and motivate a mentally healthy environment: a reducer of alcohol, cigarettes, or other unhealthy methods of anxiety reduction.
Edward Miller
Actually I hear Alaskans received something like 3200 dollars last
year.
Right. $3,269.00 per person in 2008 when a one-time $1,200 Alaska Resource Rebate was added to the dividend amount.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
That includes children.
This fund is well invested in energy and other funds (many without the
"fun" part, left at "Ds"!) as well. This means the income will be
significantly less this year.
For this reason, we need to address the ideal conditions for a Basic
Income.
Nathan
Nathan Cravens
Correction:
Kevin Carson
> > If you think health care cost is high now wait until you see what
> > government does with it. Look at Medicare. Look at the recent Drug
> > plan. Look at the bills already proposed to have government dictate
> > what kind of care is and is not available on the way to so-called
> > Universal Care.
>
> In the U.S., the way health care produces health care needs some examination
> and restructuring to become less wasteful than it is. Many European
> countries provide a model the U.S. can adopt. Bankruptcy and consequent
> government ownership may be what it takes before health care is improved.
The current healthcare system, including the state capitalist drug
companies and hospital chains, is about as "private" and
"market-based" as Boeing and McDonnell-Douglass. So I wouldn't
exactly cry on my pillow at the prospect of government nationalizing
it as a transitional stage to genuine social ownership.
But leaving healthcare under the administration of something like the
British National Health would be a disaster IMO. It would just lock
in the hegemony of the existing "professional" cartels, backed up by
even more state force; it would essentially leave in place the entire
pathological institutional culture, but with the bureaucrats working
for the state instead of corporations.
If government takes over, the goal should be to get the facilities in
the hands of neighborhood cooperative clinics, hospital cooperatives
owned by some combination of patients and staff, etc., and to
dismantle the licensing cartels and system of drug patents so that not
one stone is left atop another.
But IMO the chances of such a policy, by the government circles most
in favor of a "universal healthcare," are virtually nil. A better
route might be corporate bankruptcy followed by cooperative
homesteading on the Argentine model (and reorganization of existing
community nonprofits as stakeholder co-ops), coupled with pressure
from outside to dismantle the licensing cartels and drug patents.
Either way, the end-state system should be decentralized (to the
neighborhood level as much as possible) and cooperatively owned by
patients and staff. And there should be a free market in tiers of
service, so that if you need (say) somebody to listen to your lungs
and do a sputum culture, and give you a round of Zithro for your
pneumonia, you can hire a free market "barefoot doctor" who's been
trained to provide that level of basic service without paying the
amortization cost of an entire med school education and residency.
Free market advocatres, of the right-wing variety, frequently point
out that if there were food insurance there would be a lot more steak
and a lot less hamburger, and premiums and the cost of food as a share
of GDP would skyrocket. True, as far as it goes. The problem is
we've got a system of cartels in place to criminalize buying anything
BUT "steak" when it comes to healthcare.
Whenever well-meaning people call for government to make something
free and universal, the real-world result means that you get the
product government wants to provide whether you want it or not, and if
you try to buy something unauthorized you go to jail. We've got
"free" and "universal" education, and the practical effect is to put
the system under lockdown by licensed teachers and professional school
administrators (not to mention the institutional culture propagated in
teachers' colleges and education departments), and to crowd out
homeschooling, deschooling, unschooling, cooperative schools, and
alternative and community schools.
--
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html