If you have a job that doesn’t pay enough to live on or to take care of your family would $5,000 or $20,000 extra for a family of four help if you received this once a year?
This could be done in in the U.S. by charging rent for the use of our commons and for carbon taxes, financial transactions, intellectual property and technological infrastructure seeded with public money. Then there is also our natural resources, such as natural gas, oil, iron, gold, silver, copper, trees, water, clean air—all of these and more is considered sovereign wealth, which belongs to every U.S. citizen.
Each citizen should have one share in America and receive each year dividends. Just like the corporations, which are using our commons for the most part free and it is time for them to pay up. This is what is done in the state of Alaska with its oil product. The citizens receive about $2,000 each a year as compensation.
Most wage slave people here in the U.S. and around the world do not understand the concept of the commons and that they are the owners and should be compensated for the use of these commons, which have and are making the 1 percent of this world very rich and leaving the rest in the economy ruined. One out of every 21 people in New York is a millionaire, how did they get this money?
There is a movement on this in some states in America and in some countries, but every wage slaves and the people who are retired don’t have jobs and all who are still in college should read the book, “With Liberty and Dividends For All” by Peter Barnes.
This concept is not new, and Barnes outlines the concept and how it’s been underutilized. It started in the 17th century by Gerrard Winstanley, who led protests in England against enclosure and now in 2015, the time is ripe to consider this as the new economy for the 99 percent.
To change the abundance of labor in the world is to put more money in the pockets of the laborer to buy the products their fellow workers are making. Otherwise, when there are more products than money, there is slump in the economy. Austerity policies, low wages and automation (robots) were also of concern in the 1950s when Henry Ford II, CEO of Ford, took Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers Union, on a tour of a new engine plant.
Ford gestured to a fleet of new machines and said, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” The union leader turned to Ford and said, “Henry, how are you going to get robots to buy your cars?”
This type of change in the labor has created a new type of working class that swings from task to task in order to make ends meet while enduring the loss of labor rights and bargaining rights. They are called “precariat” workers, a group of workers who live on the verge of collapse due to the instability of the nature of their job…