Guy Standing: Given that wages cannot be expected to provide the precariat with security, the system must find alternative ways of doing so. The secret lies in capturing rental income for society. We should want what Keynes predicted but which has yet to pass—“euthanasia of the rentier.” One way of capturing rental income for society would be to bring the commons into policy discourse. In the neoliberal era, the commons—natural, social, civil, cultural, and intellectual—have been plundered via enclosure, commodification, privatization, and colonization. This rent-seeking is an injustice and should be reversed.

The income from using commons resources should belong to every commoner equally. Accordingly, the tax system should shift from earned income and consumption to taxing commercial uses of the commons, thereby helping in their preservation. Levies on income gained from using our commons should become major sources of public revenue. This means such measures as a land value tax, a wealth transfer tax, ecological taxes such as a carbon tax, a water use levy, levies on income from intellectual property and on use of our personal data, a “frequent flyer levy,” and levies on all income generated by use of natural resources that should belong to us as commoners.

Fed by these levies, a Commons Fund could be set up as a democratic variant of the sovereign wealth funds that exist in over sixty countries. Then, the questions would become how to use the funds in a transformative way. The Fund should be operated on proper economic lines, adhering to investment rules geared to socially beneficial forms of capital, taking into account ecological principles and tax-paying propriety.

The Fund’s governance must be democratic and separated from the government of the day, to minimize the possibility of manipulation by politicians before elections. And every commoner should be an equal beneficiary, their stake in the Fund being an economic right, rather than dependent on contributions, as was the case with laborist welfare schemes. Everybody, regardless of taxpaying capacity, should gain, by virtue of being commoners.

The commons has been nurtured by many generations and exists for future generations. As Edmund Burke recognized, we are “temporary custodians of our commonwealth” and have the responsibility of passing on to the next generation our commons in at least as good a condition as we found it. Thus, levies on exhaustible commons resources should be preserved for future generations as well as serve existing generations. To respect this principle, only revenue generated by the Fund’s investments should be distributed to today’s commoners—you and me. This rule is applied in the world’s outstanding example, the Norwegian Pension Fund Global, which, drawing from Norway’s share of North Sea oil, generates a net annual return of 4% that can be disbursed to the populace.5

What is proposed here is even more transformative. The levies would be placed on all forms of commons, including non-exhaustible commons resources. Land, water, air, wind, and ideas are among non-exhaustible resources, and part of our commons. Some commons resources are replenishable, such as forests. Including non-exhaustible commons resources in the financing of the Fund is key to the transformative strategy. The only equitable way of disbursing proceeds from the Commons Fund is to give equal amounts to everybody deemed to be a commoner, and the easiest way would be to distribute “social dividends” or “commons dividends.”

Sharing the commons is one ethical rationale for basic incomes, which are justifiable for other ethical reasons as well, including ecological justice, freedom, and basic security.

Photo by acb

The post Guy Standing’s Commons Fund for the Precariat. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jacobson discusses the history of the “wages for housework” movement, connecting it to the contemporary movement for unconditional basic income.

Republished from basicincome.org

The post Basic Income & Women’s Liberation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For further references and resources on what I speak about in this video, you can find a myriad of links to articles and research papers in the description box of this video on YouTube.

The post The Gender Wage Gap Part 1: Why Statistics Are a Bitch appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Tverberg’s depiction of changes to workers share of output of economy, if costs keep rising for other portions of the economy. (Chart is only intended to illustrate the problem; it is not based on a study of the relative amounts involved.)

A description of each element:

• Pollution control. Pollution sinks are already full. Continuing to use non-renewable resources (including burning fossil fuels) adds increased pollution. Workarounds have costs, and these take an increasing share of the output of the economy.
• Energy used in energy production. When we started extracting energy products, the cheapest, easiest-to-extract energy products were chosen first. The energy products that are left are higher-cost to extract, and thus require a larger share of the goods the economy produces for extraction.
• Water, metals, and soil workarounds. These suffer from deteriorating quantity and quality, leading to the need for workarounds such as desalination plants, deeper mines, and more irrigated land. All of these take an increasingly large share of the output of the economy.
• Interest and dividends. Capital goods tend to be purchased through debt or sales of stock. Either way, interest payments and dividends must be made, leaving less for workers.
• Increasing hierarchy. Companies need to be larger in size to purchase and manage all of the capital goods needed to work around shortages. High pay for supervisors reduces funds available to pay lower-ranking employees.
• Government funding and pensions. Government programs grow in size in good times, but are hard to cut back in hard times. Pensions, both government and private, are a particular problem because the number of elderly people tends to grow.

We should note that the current system is based on competition and large scale production. There should be obvious now that with these rising problems of all sorts, what can solve them is the opposite of what created them, and that is cooperation and distribution of production. This can best be achieved using the RID-model (Representative Ingroup Democracy) of Terje Bongard. It’s a model of an economical democracy organized in self organizing production cells with an ideal size for cooperation, linked together in a larger network structure.

But we are in a hurry now, as we are standing on the edge on the Stagflation Period of the Secular Cycle!

Shape of typical Secular Cycle, based on work of Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov in Secular Cycles. Chart by Gail Tverberg.

Unfortunately the Research Council of Norway debunked Bongard’s initiative back in 2014, and the tipping point might be reached meanwhile. Still, Bongard is now translating his book “The biological Human Being – individuals and societies in light of evolution” into English all by himself, as he couldn’t find an international publisher. This in spite of that it has sold more than 2500 copies in Norway.

I hope the p2p-community will embrace this book, as it might help us from entering another intercycle, which will have unforeseen consequences with the global reach of our problems.

The illustrations are from Gail Tverberg’s post “Why we have a wage inequality problem“.

The post Why Wages of Workers are Squeezed appeared first on P2P Foundation.