Milton Friedman's Basic Income

It's as Moses says in The Ten Commandments: "A city is made from brick. The strong make many, the weak make few, the dead make none."



We've known about this for how long? People on the left like to have a permanent underclass from whom to extract votes and people on the right believe the asinine notion that starvation is a good motivation to make people work. No, it's not, it's a shitty motivation. People who have all their basic needs met work harder, have more enthusiasm to work, and reinvest more into the economy. That's not me saying it, that's Adam Smith saying it. That's Milton Friedman saying it. I don't care what Rust Lumbar or Sean Hannity, who owns Section 8 housing yet pretends to be a regular blue collar guy, think. They're snakes and vermin.



Friedman suggested something he called a "negative income tax". Anyone making below what was at the time a living wage ($3,000 a year, or $21,000 a year today) would be given the difference up to half ($1,500 or $10,600). The minimum amount never changes. With welfare today if you're collecting and you have a job you're penalised, which disincentivises people on welfare to work. On Friedman's plan the minimum amount is guaranteed, so you can work and earn more and never have to worry about having money taken away from you.

Milton Friedman on Drug Legalisation

"The role of the government is to protect the drug cartels. That's literally true."
- Milton Friedman

The Future Requires Universal Basic Income

Technology is advancing to the point where it will be necessary to do one of two things:



1. Kill billions of people who will have no jobs



or



2. Pay people to live



Universal basic income is opposed by the left because they won't be able to use welfare to bribe voters, and it's opposed by the right because poor people can go die in a gutter. UBI can be instituted by redirecting current government spending toward helping people instead of turning politicians and executives into royalty and demigods, and it will solve many many problems that fall under the broad category of "human suffering". We've reached a point as a species where we have the technology to eliminate most human suffering, we just refuse to do so because of the two reasons stated above.

Dean Radin on Real Magic

Garrett Stevens, host of the Hemi-Sync Podcast, interviews Dean Radin about his new book Real Magic.

Stop thinking about having fun and have it

Expanding on the last topic from earlier this week. Life is full of suffering, but it's also full of joy too.

You Are Going To Die

In the past couple weeks we've seen three prominent deaths of First Lady Barbara Bush, Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermey, and radio raconteur Art Bell. That makes this as good a time as any to reflect on death, and the inevitability of death. It is an extremely good, and powerful, mystical practice.

This body is a temporary construct, a little vortex within the waves, and it will fall apart eventually. In some people, like myself, probably sooner rather than later. However far ahead that date may be, it is inevitable. It doesn't matter if you're David Rockefeller and you have infinity billion dollars and you can buy your fifth heart transplant at age 101 knowing that you have a 50-50 chance of surviving another year when a young person could get that heart and live at least 25 more years, maybe long enough to see the day when we're growing new hearts from our own stem cells. All the gold in the world cannot protect you from death. There is NOTHING you can do to escape it.

I'm reminded of that scene in The Ten Commandments where the angel of death descends upon Egypt. The Egyptians try to escape the green mist, they try to board up their windows and plug the holes in their doors, but nothing can stop it. They are struck in absolute terror at this omnipresent force that claims sinner and saint alike. Your wealth, your fame, your accomplishments, how good or bad you were, nothing can stop death. The only thing you can do is to have faith in the Lord. That is the ultimate good news. Christ died to erase our sins and to save us from death. He rose again and destroyed death, the central illusion underpinning this world.

Remember the likes of Richard Rose and Ramana Maharshi, both of whom were stricken by the intense fear of death and then made it their life's goal to discover what survives. I believe they've succeeded, and we must all walk that path and find the Truth for ourselves.

Healing the Centurion's Servant

Jesus heals the servant of a Roman Centurion with but a command, from the 1977 mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.