Submitted to: www.observer.co.uk on: Fri, 24 Feb 2017

Universal Basic Income

Dear Editor,

I read Sonia Sodha's piece on Universal Basic Income (The Observer, 19th February 2017) and agree that it all sounds very good. Indeed, with growing automation in the workplace, measures are needed to prevent the job-market from imploding. But here I would like to tell you about a very surreal conversation that I had with some friends of mine recently ...

We were discussing the Universal Basic Income (UBI) and so I asked the friends what productive things they would do with the increased freedom which UBI would give them. One friend said that he would use the time to restore classic cars and another expressed an interest in knitting and clothing design.

For me this is proof of the "madness" of modern society: We have invested massive effort in creating mechanisms to eliminate work but have somehow "thrown the baby out with the bathwater". This was confirmed to me by these two friends who expressed interest in taking on (as a hobby) exactly those tasks which we have (in the real economy) "given away" to machines. So this begs the question "why bother automating?". Why not simply keep a wide range of tasks relatively manual so that a good number of people have stimulating, productive occupations and the self-respect that goes along with that.

However, there is one further, much darker, argument against UBI: How can we in the West award ourselves such payments when the shirts on our backs and the phones in our pockets have been produced by exploited workers in China and in Bangladesh? Workers who have no access to privileges like UBI! Implementing UBI with such unbalanced terms of trade is simply decadence on our part!

Regards
Alan

Comment: In the article it is mentioned that Universal Basic Income could be funded by a 3p increase in income tax. This I find very strange because surely it is the companies who are implementing automation, artificial intelligence and outsourcing/off-shoring who are the ones causing the problem and creating the need for measures like UBI? So surely it should be these companies who should carry the cost? The logic should be quite simple: Those who automate (or similar) pay.

And, indeed, just as companies today use the knowledge that low-paid employees can supplement their incomes with "in-work benefits" in order to cut wages to the absolute minimum, so unscrupulous companies would use UBI to further save wage costs.

On top of this there is the fact that larger corporations (those likely to implement radical staff-reducing measures) are often those who have international operations and use tax-havens and other tricks to systematically "avoid" their tax-obligations.