UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
Peter Nelson
Economist and Fellow Chartered Accountant, as an International Financial Consultant have carried out assignments for all major international donors in many countries.
In 2018 when I published UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME AND THE THREAT TO DEMOCRACY AS WE KNOW IT, many critics decried that this would ever happen given that it had been tried elsewhere and turned down. In particular they referred to the Swiss trial proposed but in that, the amount suggested could have been too little.
Now in 2020 and governments around the globe are finding how so many of their people have lost income and had to devise various schemes to provide enough income for those people to survive. OK people might not like the term UBI or the Universal part of that but the principle is the same. Out of 2020 we still do not know how this will wash out but it is likely that welfare payments will have to continue for a long time, most likely indefinitely.
The threat from this covers the unrest in the world and in particular in America the bastion of Democracy as it is now touted. There has arisen a major economic divide which does not look like being solved any time soon where it is not about black lives but the difference between the haves and have nots, many of the latter believe things will never get better. This unrest historically leads to revolt. Which is where the Chinese come in and say to America, if you can't control a population of 330 million, don't criticize what we have to do to control 1.4 billion.
So now in the West there are already draconian controls imposed to constrain the population and while perhaps executions do not take place for people not appropriately social distancing, arbitrary policing is taking place so that the general public from day to day has no idea of what the rules are so just have to do what they are told by what ever police officer confronts them. Just consider letting criminals out of jail while jailing people trying to cross borders to get home to loved ones. What next?
Oh, and my sister was injured this week falling into a hole in the bunker while playing social distanced golf. Why the hole: because golf courses are now not permitted to have rakes at bunkers in case of Covid transmission...