Skip to main content

Thomas Paine Advocated Payment for Commons

Why should the top 1 percent get their income from no labor and everyone else should toil like wage slaves to hopefully make ends meet? Capitalism creates two kinds of income. One is derived from physical or mental labor; the other is from ownership of property rights. At this time the what’s left of the middle class gets nearly all of it’s income from labor. Counting Social Security and pensions as deferred wages and salaries. The top 1 percent gets their income from capital gains, dividends and property income, which is also taxed at lower rates than labor income. So to even this up, there should be a way for the wage slaves to reap some non-labor income to offset the inequality of labor and wages. This should be a birth right for everyone. Everyone should get dividends from charging rent for our Commons, by those profiting off our ecosystems, sciences, technologies, legal system, roads, oil reserves, minerals, and more. These Commons are co-owned by everyone at birth, and paid out as stock dividends, as they do in Alaska for the oil, and a county in Oregon is doing with wind farms. Vermont is considering doing this. Norway has corporations pay into an account and the money is used to fund its government thereby paying for free healthcare and other social programs. This is not a new concept. Thomas Paine, 1737-1809, wrote a books on the notion of paying people for using our Commons. His books are: Common Sense, The American Crisis, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice, which is about property rights and not agriculture. Paine wrote that there are two kinds of property. First, natural property, or that which comes to us from the creator of the universe, such as the earth, air and water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property, such as the inventions of man. The latter kind of property must necessarily be distributed unequally, but the first kind rightfully belongs to everyone equally. Paine thought it was the legitimate birthright of every man and woman, not a charity, but a right. The world is running out of labor jobs so we must look at some kind of a mix of labor wages and non-labor wages if we expect the capitalist system to not disappear as we know it today.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Have the MAGA/FBI infiltrated Labor Unions?

Have FBI agitators infiltrated our labor unions like the FBI did during black rights movement, feminist movement, and anti-Vietnam protests to sow the seeds of division between the factions and Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed—to control and disrupt our labor movements from the inside? We don’t know at this time, and is anyone in the media or government looking into this? The war on labor and the effort to drag us back to serf wages is coming from within the White House with some labor union and MAGA members. Corporations are padding their accounts and of one greedy man instead of its workers. The war on labor is and will be fought between corporation titans and labor, and at this time the corporations will use the White House, courts and the FBI and even those at Homeland Security and I.C.E. against us. Labor must educate our members on how counter and what tactics are being used by the corporations and government against labor and the average person in general. How many people have lost...
Post a Comment
Read more

Unions Expand or Face Extinction

In 2026 unions worldwide must educate and expand their memberships or face certain death. We need to educate our workers to understand that the republican party does not care about, does not deserve their support or votes and only cares about the billionaires. The GOP is their enemy and not their friends. The GOP and billionaires are the workers’ enemy. They want the workers’ sweat and blood for as cheap as they can get it. These greedy people and their insatiable appetite for more leaving us with much less will not stop until we’re forced to work for scraps and fighting each other for the pittance. They will not invite you to golf with them or go hunting or to dinner with them. In fact, they are always in pursuit of ways to destroy our unions and the way of life we’ve obtain by being union. One way they are doing this is to use the court system, especially the lop-sided Supreme Court, to take away our union rights and to get more states to vote for The Right to Work, which leaves work...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Do You Deserve?

The survival of American democracy requires the existence of a flourishing union work force. In a survey, 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions. So, as an old sheet metal organizer, I say we need to go all out in organizing while the soldering iron is hot, to use a sheet metal workers tool. We should organize all workers no matter where or what kind of work they do. All workers have the right to belong to a union and all should support each other. If you, in your work place, do not know how to form a union, then do what Napoleon’s military adopted adage, ‘Jump into the battle and then figure it out.’ One of the best ways to organize is worker to worker and plan it out over a meal or coffee and talk to other union workers to see what would work best for you and also what unions are winning at this time. Just go for it. When things are in disarray, like the shit show in Washington, D.C., they might not even know what you are doing until it is too late for them to push back aga...
Post a Comment
Read more