Universal Empowerment Infrastructure’s (USI) 5 Cornerstones:
- Universal Legal Equality (including merit-based reward)
- Universal Liberal Democracy (including compulsory-voting)
- Universal Education
- Universal Healthcare
- The Universal Survival Income (USI) substituted for Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW).
In Australia, we already have 4 out of 5.
Regarding our current NSW lockdown
ACOSS CEO Dr Cassandra Goldie said:
“This is a public health issue – people can’t stay home in lockdown if they lose their home because they cannot afford to keep it.”
Brianna Casey, CEO, Foodbank Australia, said:
“Foodbank is doing an extraordinary job of treating the personal hardship symptoms of the pandemic through the provision of vitally important food relief, but what is urgently needed is a focus on the cause: growing inequality and poverty.”
Anglicare Australia Executive Director Kasy Chambers said:
“Two in five Australians have had to cope with an insecure income in the past year.”
Chris Povey, CEO, Justice Connect, said:
“We see many struggling to pay the rent, unable to put food on the table and missing out on essential health care needs. We know what’s right, and we know what works – adequate income support.”
Toni Wren, Executive Director, Anti-Poverty Week, said:
“We know that more than 1 in 6 children are living in poverty across Australia. Anti-Poverty Week is particularly concerned about the impact on families with children reliant on the low working age payments.”
Dr Don Perlgut, CEO, Community Colleges Australia, said:
“All things are secondary to living in a safe and secure environment with sufficient funds to meet basic needs. The vulnerable and disadvantaged learners who study with Australia’s adult and community education providers cannot engage in learning without their basic needs being met.”
CC: Jon Owen, Pastor & CEO, Wayside Chapel
Bill Gye (OAM), CEO, Community Mental Health Australia (CMHA)
July 31, 2021
Hi
Rather than ever-reverting to Band-Aids, why not, once and for all, infrastructuralise survival-income via implementing The Universal Survival Income (USI)?
The most common objections are:
- It ‘costs’ too much
- It develops a welfare-dependent ‘something-for-nothing’ mentality
- It overlooks the ‘dignity of work’
1. Cost Versus Investment
Welfare is a ‘cost’ because it is a 1-way abyss, which government perpetually pipelines tax-revenue into and, yet, despite ever-increasing the flow, our Socio-Econo-Enviro- (SEE) problems mushroom.
So, the CDO hereby ties its flag to the mast by humbly stating the obvious:
‘What we are doing is not working and doing more of it will also fail, which means we should stop doing it and – in the understanding, the problem, rather than being complex is likely to be something relatively simple – use our greatest attribute – our minds – to analyse why it is failing.”
In this regard, the CDO’s contribution is the following…
Whereas Welfare is a ‘cost’, The USI belongs to a non-cost paradigm known as, ‘investment’.
That is, like Universal Education and in contrast to Welfare, The USI is a 2-way self-funding investment that yields exponentially eclipsing returns – i.e. if it were a business, it would be profitable.
Yes – just like Universal Education, not only will The USI not cost anything, it will make us, at least, twice (or up to 6 times) as prosperous.
[Imagine the implications for our security – instead of our economy being the equivalent of 10% of China’s, it should be ….]
Compare this with the clunky Debtmaker Band-Aids of Jobseeker, Jobkeeper and, now, Lockdown-keeper, which still fail to guarantee a survival-income – i.e. resources piped into the abyss.
The key is to substitute The USI for Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW).
Each year, we have a circus surrounding the national minimum wage case in which the super-Empowered from the Left argue with the super-Empowered from the Right and then, following the entertainment, the ‘Fair Work’ Commission Empowereds – a lot of marvellous salaries – absurdly arbitrate how many cents to raise the hourly minimum wage.
None of it does anything to solve exploitation; yet, the presence of UMHoW is the sole reason we have unemployment/underemployment.
Put $20,000 in the hands of all in-country non-incarcerated adult citizens – including minimum-wage paid-workers, gig-contractors and small-business – and the abolition of Indirect-Slavery is achieved.
Moreover, with substantial labour market deregulation, it is also a boon to business.
Thus, to UMHoW-sentamentalists, without belittling the emotion attached to the blood, sweat and tears history, UMHoW is far more valuable as a trade-in for The USI upgrade than it is intrinsically.
After all, with The USI implemented, Poverty, Unemployment, [‘dole-bludger’] Stigma & [‘Robodebt’-type] Harassment (PUSH) will be eradicated not to mention much of the current lockdown stress.
In this way, correlating our infrastructure so that, rather than swimming against its current, we are swimming with it, we will be working smarter not harder.
Survival-income: why not infrastructuralise it?
And, given, since the Industrial Revolution, worker productivity has been leveraged around 10,000 times (since 2010, more than doubling), which indicates the magnitude of our wastage, even if The USI was a cost rather than an investment, it would still be affordable.
2. Inheritance: ‘Something-for-Nothing’
All inheritance is something-for-nothing and, no matter what we believe we’ve individually achieved, we are nothing without inheritance.
After all, we inherit our very existence (plus its time and place), our society (including its history, culture and institutions), our science and technology etc etc.
Of course, there are also individual inheritance variations such as IQ, EQ, physical health, physical capabilities, family harmony, school, socio-economic background etc.
Try being a self-made go-getter if you come from an unstable background, with interrupted education, poor health and a comparatively low IQ.
In addition, some Empowereds who shake their heads at the ‘something-for-nothings’ (and/or kick the Disempowereds while they’re down), inherit hundreds of thousands or even billions of dollars but, somehow, that’s how it should be.
Survival-income: why not infrastructuralise it?
So, we have one set of citizens ridiculing another set of citizens, yet when the Empowered are suddenly Disempowered by Covid – i.e. lockdown has temporary similarities with those who are permanently locked-out of mainstream society – they suddenly begin singing ‘we are all in this together’ and anyone who doesn’t do what they say is ‘selfish’.
If we are serious, we will infrastructuralise ‘We Are All In This Together’ with The USI.
Currently, selfishness is infrastructuralised in that we are all forced to prioritise obtaining our survival-income as opposed to maximising our societally-contributive self-actualisation.
This prioritisation anomaly is a legacy of The Industrial Revolution when subsistence-farmers were encouraged to give-up direct control over their survival needs to become machinists earning money-income, which is indirectly used to purchase needs (survival-income) and, perhaps, desires (luxury-income).
Ideally, this should have spawned a new Universal Empowerment Infrastructure (UEI) pact between government and citizen; however, without the narrative, it didn’t happen.
Nevertheless, in much of the West, 4 out of 5 of the UEI cornerstones, via struggle, subsequently evolved with just The USI being blocked by UMHoW-sentamentalists on the Left and the ‘cruel-to-be-kind’ ‘something-for-somethingists’ on the Right.
Consider this, if The USI (the Indirect-Slavery antidote) had been implemented 200 years ago then Marx wouldn’t have seen worker-exploitation, which means he wouldn’t have written The Communist Manifesto, which means we wouldn’t today have a Xi Jin Ping led Red China, which means we wouldn’t have had a lab leak (or such as tantrums against Aussie lobsters), which means we wouldn’t have a lock-down.
Do you see it? Humanity’s quintessential sliding doors forget-me-not – the source of all our culminating exponentiating perfect storm of Socio-Econo-Enviro- (SEE) catastrophes. [Please see it.]
The major challenge in seeing it is that it’s all we’ve ever known and no one wants to think of their attitudes – much less their behaviour – as being uncivilised.
Nevertheless, the failure to implement The USI violates nature’s role for a society – i.e. to maximise cooperative-competition (Coopetition) [sport as opposed to street-brawling] – and its absence continues to contradict nature, which is why we have our SEE catastrophes.
The solution contemporarily is the solution historically is the solution to Indirect-Slavery is the solution of The USI because it delivers and, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, always was destined to deliver, Civilisationism.
Yet, from Communism to Fascism, ironically, Civilisationism is surely the only thing humanity hasn’t yet tried.
We can’t go back in history but we can infrastructurally civilise the present and future.
3. The Dignity of Work
There is paid-work and there is unpaid-work – just because another person reckons they can make a buck out of paying you a buck to do some work doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more important than unpaid-work.
As for dignity – this is an ivory tower idea – not everyone finds dignity let alone maximises their dignity in paid-work.
In addition:
- A household is society’s most important ‘small business’
- The unpaid-carer is society’s most important ‘job’
- Companionship is becoming relatively more important
- Children are, literally, society’s future
- Paid-work disproportionately damages the environment
Out of the Socio-Econo-Enviro- (SEE) categories, the economy is not fundamentally the most important – it is just an indirect means of getting what we want or desire.
For instance, isn’t it sometimes better to cook for oneself than go to a restaurant and sometimes vice-versa?
Survival-income: why not infrastructuralise it?
And, the reluctance to infrastructuralise survival-income is because, as yet, no country has ever done it, which means there is an elephant-sized gold medal in national kudos for the first to fully adopt the Universal Empowerment Infrastructure (UEI) model, which is ultimately destined to civilise the world.
For example, why after 20 years has the model imposed on Afghanistan spectacularly failed to gain the required traction?
Perhaps, because it’s a similar model to the one that is heaving apart in the U.S.A.
The U.S.A has the worst UEI in the Western World – i.e. as well as its USI-absence, it has a biased legal system, a corrupted democracy, a heterogenous education system and no Universal Healthcare.
Regarding Afghanistan, while democracy and schooling for girls is important, it’s not enough – would it be enough for you?
The major complaints Afghans have against their government are:
- Corruption
- Incompetence.
Yet, as well as being an Indirect-Slavery-abolisher, The USI is a corruption and incompetence bypasser because it puts the money immediately directly in the hands of citizens.
So, wouldn’t The USI going into every single adult pocket every single month be something worth fighting the Taliban for?
Even just 10 USD a month would do it.
Regarding the environment, our biggest problems are:
- Global population, which, in 1804, was 1 billion and, 217 years later, is 7.9 billion and still rising
- The correlation of social-status with materialism
[I.e. plastics filling waterways, habitat destruction, Climate change etc are symptoms not causes.]
If, 200 years ago, we had The USI, our population would still be around a billion.
Population growth in the Developing world continues because, due to The USI-absence, they need large families for cheap labour and old-age security. The USI will also dramatically lower the number of subsistence-farmers, which will lower land-clearing.
Social-status is correlated with materialism because, due to The USI-absence, the first priority is one’s own survival-income, which, among other things, trains the mind that the self is more important than societal-contribution.
Regarding our problems with Authoritarian-Illegitimates such as Xi Jin Ping, the full (USI-inclusive) UEI model will re-capture the imaginations of their populations such that they will demand Universal Empowerment for themselves, which will decisively undermine those regimes.
With Weapons of Mass Destruction ubiquitous, there is no military solution, which means the only way to defeat the Authoritarian-Illegitimates is to perfect our governance model such that they are attacked internally.
Conclusion
The full Universal Empowerment Infrastructure (UEI) is the only way to solve all our Socio-Econo-Enviro (SEE) catastrophes such that they become manageable because The USI alone eradicates the Indirect-Slavery of conditional access to one’s survival-income.
In the interim, with a Federal Election looming, given there is still no Party advocating for the substitution of The USI for UMHoW, perhaps we need a new one dedicated to abolishing Indirect-Slavery – a potential name is The Civil Party to reflect its Civilisationism aspirations.
Any ideas?
We leave you with a message from a young front-liner who I regard as a mentor …
Whilst we know that remaining connected to community is so important right now, division seems to be the order of the day, when every piece of media demands that we pick a side and join the fight. There are a lot of ‘pseudo-communities’ popping up at the moment. It’s an easy retreat, to side with a cause that only seeks to be against. Oppositional energy that has no destination slowly erodes the heart. The path of love is beset by uncertainty on all sides, but at least it knows where it is headed. The best we can do right now is to acknowledge that each of us has their own unique journey, and empathy and compassion is the only way to exist outside of judgment. It isn’t survival of the fittest, but the quality of the connections we possess that will get us through, so in the middle of all the “take care of yourself” messages I always like to add, “and take care of others”.
Jon Owen July 29, 2021
Thank you.
Best regards
Paul Ross
Founder
The Citizen’s Dividend Organisation (CDO) Australia
The Civilisationism Organisation (TCO)
https://citizens-dividend.org/
https://www.facebook.com/paul.ross.798
https://twitter.com/paulross2
Humanity is being confronted by a perfect storm of culminating exponentiating Socio-Econo-Enviro- (SEE) Catastrophes including:
- Socio: poverty, stigmatisation, homelessness, mental-illness, excapism (such as drug & alcohol abuse), suicide, domestic-violence etc.
- Econo: unemployment, the welfare-to-work distortion, Jobs-Jobs-Jobs (Triple-J) politics, which has led to BS jobs-for-jobs’-sake & Manage-the-Manufactured-Mess (Triple-M) paid-work, the massive inefficiency of not ‘exclusively producing and delivering the goods & services we desire’ etc.; and,
- Enviro:
- Natural: ecosystem destruction, species extinction, the explosive human population plague, plastic islands, climate change etc.
- International: our weaknesses boost Democracy’s enemies, which is currently catalysing international rivalry such as with China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
Hypothesis: These catastrophes are due to a single foundational ‘Society-Individual Interface’ contradiction whose deleterious effects are cascading through every facet of society.
The relevant contradiction is the partial absence of the natural-morality-derived minimalist ‘Universal Empowerment Infrastructure’ (UEI), which consists of the 5 interdependent interactively-fortifying cornerstones of:
- Universal Legal Equality (including Merit-based Reward) – [In Australia] comparatively robust;
- Universal Liberal Democracy – comparatively robust;
- Universal Healthcare – comparatively robust;
- Universal Education – comparatively robust;
- Universal Survival Income (USI) substituted in place of Universal Minimum Hourly Wages (UMHoW) – No, not yet.
[This USI-absence detracts from each of the other cornerstones making them all far less effective – for example, The USI-absence means homelife for many children is far less harmonious than it should be, which means, amongst other things, their capacity to concentrate on their education is compromised.]
The Socio-Econo-Environment-Harmonising Universal Survival Income (USI):
It’s not that it is the solution;
It’s that its absence is the problem.
The Taxpayer-to-Citizen-Transfer [Please note: Regarding the Society-Individual interface, unlike the current system, this is not a ‘cost’ but a ‘transfer’ and, in addition, it is not 1-way Welfare, which predominantly benefits recipients, but 2-way Infrastructure that, as with the other UEI cornerstones, has a return equivalent to multiples of the investment because it helps maximise societally-contributive self-actualisation.]
Around $20,000 per year x 18 million (non-incarcerated in-country adult Australian citizens) + $5,000 x 4.5 million (children) = $386 billion.
This may be achieved by (2018 figures):
- Abolishment of the Tax-Free Threshold ($35 billion);
- Reallocating $150 billion of the $175 billion Social Services budget (yes, federally, we are already spending almost half of what we need), which still leaves $25 billion to top up pensions and disability payments; and,
- Inserting a 20% full-breadth GST (no – it’s not regressive if the Disempowered are net beneficiaries; also, the wealthy and multinationals’ capacity to avoid a GST is particularly limited), which results in $200 billion minus $60 billion (from the current 10% gap-ridden GST) equaling an additional $140 billion.
In addition to this $325 billion total, there will be massive human-capital, efficiency, societal-involvement and trust gains, which means, not only is the USI easily afforded, we will be, at least, twice as prosperous such that it will amount to a win-win-win in which all community segments – the wealthy; the middle-class; and, the currently disempowered – all win.
In the process, the economy will also be transformed from an inefficient, resource-wasting and environment-trashing own-goal one to ‘an efficient production and distribution of goods and services we desire’ one.
That is, currently, around half our 13 million paid-workers have jobs that are either:
- Jobs-for-jobs-sake B.S. paid-work – such as excess public service jobs and subsidised/protected private enterprise jobs; or,
- Manage-the-Manufactured-Mess (‘Triple-M’) paid-work – such as Centrelink and excess legal, charity, mental-health etc jobs.
Then, there is the massive permeating benefit of achieving full-employment.
That is, with everyone taken care of and invested with the freedom to say ‘no’ to an employer plus the present social-status premium on paid-work over unpaid-work rectified, there will be a massive flow of power to the disempowered and working classes, which will lead to a workers’ paradise.
Yet, this workers’ paradise will enable significant labour-market deregulation (i.e. everyone is already being looked after so, while we may continue to feel an emotional attachment to, for instance, economy-wide minimum-wages, in practice, there will no longer be a need for them).
And, this means many of our millions of volunteers can get paid something and our young, elderly, relatively unskilled, disabled, unpaid-carers, 800,000+ unemployed and 1.1 million+ underemployed can, if they desire, get paid-work (or, more work) such that ‘anyone who, at the going rate, wants paid-work, can get it’.
In addition, the USI will eradicate the current welfare-to-paid-work distortion where there is a disincentive to acquire paid-work because, in doing so, one loses one’s welfare.
Furthermore, full-employment will result in wages and conditions being bid-up.
And yet, business, as well as benefiting from deregulation, rather than having to tolerate the current crop of unhappy conscripts, will benefit from an army of volunteer workers, which given, with regard to morale and productivity, ‘one bad apple spoils the barrel’, will deliver massive productivity efficiencies.
This means our tradables’ sector – especially manufacturing – will roar.
The Citizen’s Dividend Organisation’s Commitment (August 1, 2019):
1. Short-term (interim) – At the 2022 Australian Federal Election (unlike in 2019), at least one registered political party will have the USI as its signature policy such that the USI is an election issue; and,
2. Medium-term (end) – At the 2025 Australian Federal Election, the winner has a mandate for the implementation of a USI, which it then prosecutes.
Without The Universal Survival Income (USI),
It’s Impossible to Save the Environment.