What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test.

[hunter]

150. Some things are worse than others...

Reading or writing a book does less damage to the natural environment than driving a car to work. I don't know how much fossil fuel is burned supporting each of my posts on DU, but I hope it's not a lot. My own computer setup, from the phone line through my computer, burns less than twenty watts. That's much lower than it was back in the days of computers with big, bulky 100 watt CRT monitors and desktop computers with fans and spinning metal hard drives .

By some planning and good fortune my wife and I have avoided the automobile commuter lifestyle since the mid 'eighties.

I rather resent the fact that I have to own a car to be considered a functional adult in most of the U.S.A. so I drive a thirty year old car with a salvage title, doing the best I can not to contribute to the manufacture of any new cars. My car is in good running order, has a catalytic converter, and it's not especially polluting because I only fill the tank with gasoline every other month or two, whether it needs it or not. Most days I don't drive.

When my wife and I met we were Los Angeles commuters. It frequently took us more than an hour to drive less than twenty miles in our commutes. That's a lot of time wasted, much fossil fuel burned, much air polluted.

I can think of a million things I'd rather do than go shopping. I buy food, most of it local, I buy clothing, about half new and half from the thrift stores. All of my electronic goodies were somebody else's garbage except for a Raspberry Pi I bought about a year ago to familiarize myself with ARM microprocessors. (Rooting Android devices doesn't thrill me; just give me something I can run Debian on. No, I don't do Windows or anything else Microsoft.)

Of course I'm a hypocrite because I live in a house with a refrigerator, washing machine, and dryer because those are things my wife can afford and won't do without.

My own natural off-my-meds state is invisible-dumpster-diving-homeless-person. Fortunately I've always had friends and family to look after me. As I've looked after others. At my lowest point I was living in a broken car in a church parking lot, and later in a backyard garden shed belonging to a PTSD Vietnam war veteran.

Anyways, it's easy to be happy without buying lots of stuff. Sadly, most people don't know how. They've been trained by this society to be "consumers," they've been trained to be "productive."

Unfortunately this "economic productivity" as we now define it is destroying the natural environment that supports all humanity and our own human spirit. Most of us suffer work that does not make the world a better place, or else we suffer "unemployment."

It doesn't have to be that way. Money is an entirely human invention and we can modify and regulate it's use any way we choose, preferably by democratic means, in ways that increase our happiness as a people, and decrease the damage we do to the natural environment.