Interesting things being proposed in Switzerland that hopefully will start a worldwide trend. The Swiss will be voting on whether to limit executive compensation to 12 times the salary of the lowest paid employee. Another initiative to give every Swiss citizen $2800 a month qualified to be voted on.
A great summary here: http://www.businessinsider.com/behind-the-swiss-unconditional-income-iniative-2013-10
To quote from one of the backers in the article:
We are not proposing a minimum income – we are proposing an unconditional income.
A minimum wage reduces freedom – because it is an additional rule. It tries to fix a system that has been outdated for a while. It is time to partly disconnect human labor and income. We are living in a time where machines do a lot of the manual labor – that is great – we should be celebrating.
This fits into my post regarding peak labor – maybe the Swiss are addressing the same issue with forward thinking, rather than the US trying to attack the problem with Quantitative Easing. Also, note this forward thinking is coming via public initiative. Here in Washington State, public initiative forced governments to deal with the legalization of Marijuana – something entrenched governments should have been discussing for 30 years. The idea of public initiative process seems counter productive in a government where people are elected to deal with issues. However, it seems to be a useful tool to force representitive government to listen to new ideas.
Can you imagine the Republican response to those Swiss initiatives? Your post on the Secession movement would probably be prophetic if that happened in the United States.
I have a different idea which I really like. I would propose that all adult citizens be given credits for housing, food, health care and education. These credits would be given to everyone and could be only be used for those items. If everyone got a $15000 /year housing credit then everyone can afford a place to live. If you already have a house you can use it to pay your property taxes. Parents with children would get additional credit for the children. We can then eliminate all kinds of extra bureaucracy and programs we have to deal with low income individuals. We would also get to eliminate all the abuse dealing with ‘means’ testing which is often subjective. I’m sure there would need to be some changes to specific ideas to make them work properly but I think the basic idea holds. (For example I think everyone should be entitled to the same free complete health care.)
Once everyone had reasonable access to these four items then the capitalistic system could take over as everything you get above this would be based on your own desire for additional income.
If you have zero income (and yes, I am LOOKING–the low paying jobs won’t consider me because I’m over qualified, the medium paying jobs are going to people who are 1/2 my age, and less qualified, but perhaps less expensive). So age is a primary factor because that is how health insurance costs are calculated. I can’t even get a LOW paying job in my industry! Credits don’t help if companies prefer hiring offshore contractors (and believe me, it would help if I spoke something other than English because 75% of the call backs have such thick accents, I think speaking their native language would yield results).