Last week I was ambushed by a glib well practiced Flat-Earther, who left me, frankly, gobsmacked: and almost impossibly, to me: without an answer.
The experience made me realize something I had forgotten about in a rush of enthusiasm. It was this. Over the past year I have presented an argument with far too much seriousness, regarding Basic pay: and how to finance it….
The sheer effrontery of my efforts have left all my readers so similarly gobsmacked, that to this moment, writing this, no one has yet raised any refutable argument against the idea. In a world almost committed to trolling the aisles of lunatic ideas I have been soundly almost curiously ignored. [Technically it is just part of the futility of being a Saharan/Namibian] grain of sand that thinks it can start a sandstorm. Not some conspiracy.]
So here is my apology for ranting on about something almost no one on the planet has ever given any thought to; and is, in its own way, as bizarre an idea as being earnestly informed, out off the blue, as it were, that the Earth is Flat, despite all protestations to the contrary.
That my ambusher last week could suggest, in all seriousness, that everything we have ever learned about the Earth, being a relatively solid ball of tangible rock n mud flying through an ever expanding Multiverse, was/ is, disinformation… Or, in the language of our times: “Fake News”.
So here too is a full konfession. I write fiction. The piece of fiction about basic pay is an idea based on a phrase that emerged from an ‘out of body’ experience that I believe I had, nearly 25 years ago. That was when I apparently flatlined, for an inordinate time: during surgery for multiple gunshot wounds. In the language of that arch-fictioneer Lobsang Rampa, I took an astral journey that may, or may not, have been anything other than a morphine, whatever, induced hallucination. That idea was what is today referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI].
So what am I on about? Firstly: I write poetic based Sci-Fi crime stories. I am also not a literary novelist. My story, “The Jonker Memorandum” is set sometime between Now and Then. Now is whatever it is when you read it [unless] Then is about a hundred and nineteen years later. The “unless” note, means you may read this after many things that were predicted to have happened along the way, have in the meantime become Now.
One of the things that becomes ‘Now’, is basic pay, something that I wrote about in 1994 that has in the meantime begun the journey to become NOW…. only now, is referred to as Universal Basic Income [UBI]. In the marketing language of Product Life Cycle curves, UBI is in the Pre-Birth stage now after [from my perspective] gestating for a quarter century. The idea itself in its various forms has a much longer gestation time. And as we know, about 90 % of all disruptive Ideas, unlike babies, abort before birth occurs.
UBI is such an idea, that is currently experiencing some prospective miscarriage at te hands of its fondest semi-supporters.
So: What is UBI?
For me it is a fiction that solves an accounting and economics based problem that troubled the professional me, about a world running on credit [as our world does presently].
My present set of three stories: i.e. Part Four* of the Azanian Quartet is set over three eras: some parts of the first half of the 20th century, and two set in different parts of the 21st.
In one of those latter two, Basic Pay [UBI] has become real… and as I have routinely repeated I write poetic fiction. It follows the realization that just as Marxist economics reached its apotheosis in 1989, so too [so-called] Neo-Liberal economics reached its own ideological sell by date in 2008, with the invention of Quantitative Easing [QE].
QE has spurred the global economy into a global casino economy; favouring oligopolies of all varieties: infesting things that once worked well. And as we all know it doesn’t matter how screwed up the political economy becomes: if you are one of the working ‘prekariat’: you still have to pay your rent and buy your own lunch.
The problem to be solved in the story was: how is Basic Pay financed. And that is the conundrum. Some of my ‘up to date’, favorite writers have come out in favour, in principle, of Basic Pay: f.i. Luce, Harari, Acemoglou among others. All have however expressed major reservations, in some cases on moral grounds; and more broadly, pure financial affordability grounds. The widely followed socialist economist Prof: Richard D Wolff on the other hand is adamantly opposed to UBI… and anything associated with it… not to mention how it could never be financed….
Ironically Wolff completely validated, for me, an observation made by Professor Guy Standing, who is a fervent advocate for solving the pending widening and growing reality; of what he calls “the dangerous class” … “the New Prekariat”… a term he has coined: through the use of UBI.
Standing argues, that spokespersons for the left had an ideological blindspot, about the entire concept of UBI
And indisputably in the old world we all lived in, UBI could not be comfortably financed with the instruments thatr we have used to fund “welfare” through the 20th century.
However we no longer live in that 20th century world: and haven’t now for nearly a dozen years. We now live in a world financed by QE…. aka Quantitative Easing. So how did we manage to finance a world using QE. QE btw is, for the uninitiated, is a polite term for mass printing of fake money on a scale that defies reason… without fueling hyperinflation. In fact what should have fueled a Zimbabwe or Venezuelan surge of prices has, to everyone’s confused horror, seemed to produce Deflation or at best Disinflation. Depending of course on what one chooses to measure.
So the US dollar that should have made Venezuela look tame has simply pottered about…. Nonetheless the inflation is there albeit the effect has been a massive asset price bubble, world wide that is, in part, fueling the huge popular discontent noted globally.
Had I encountered all my above informants varied financially founded oppositions before last year, then their thinking and mine: would have been broadly congruent.
However it is now my opinion [for reasons I have shared with you] that their and my objections were /are pre-revolutionary. I mean, the FIR* transformation changes all things … Again. And since I hardly think I am smarter that any of those aforementioned excellent writers… I choose to keep my proposed solution method, as a private fiction that I have tested on all of you on behalf of the character that introduces the financing idea, in the second part of the story mentioned above.
Ok. So you can all relax. I haven’t gone mad and flat earthly-ish type weird: I am simply progressing with the background to my story with your tacit participation.
What predictions next then, when asking: What If?
So when it comes to predictions here’s one for the road: so I can say Yay later.
Based on the current line up; I believe Senator Elizabeth Warren is the only person the Democrats can field, who can beat the Trumper in 2020: assuming she could beat the ‘Tweeds’ and secure the nomination.
*[The podcast ‘Jonker’ you will remember, is Part Three]
Cheers
!NiK[’19]