Tag Archives: Income Inequality

The Calling: How Cronyism Worsens Income Inequality (and Freed Markets Reduce It)

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By Steven Horwitz

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation

I recently gave an introductory Public Choice talk sponsored by Students for Liberty at the University of Ottawa. The next speaker was my friend Anne Rathbone Bradley, who was Skyping in from Washington. Anne gave a terrific talk about cronyism and rent-seeking that nicely complemented many of the points I’d made. But one of the side issues she raised really stuck with me, and I want to expand on it.

Anne connected cronyism (I hesitate to call it “crony capitalism”), rent-seeking, and income inequality in a way I hadn’t quite thought about before. The key to the connection is to realize some important truths about the political process.

The first truth is that cronyism is no accident. It is no accident that the U.S. economy has increasingly become one in which your connections to political power matter more for your ability to increase your wealth than does producing a product or service that consumers wish to buy. We are becoming what Ayn Rand deftly termed an “aristocracy of pull.”

The ability of some to get wealthier through political connections does trouble many on the political left, but they often argue that with better elected officials, or more ethical businesspeople, or limits on campaign contributions, we could dramatically reduce this sort of cronyism. What their argument misses is that as long as government gives out goodies, private-sector actors will find ways to get their hands on them. If you really want to take the money out of politics, you need to make it harder for politicians to hand out money.

For libertarians, the state is always little more than a dispenser of privileges to special interests. This is not an accident of who is elected or who is wealthy. Government privileges provide an easy path to profit for those who can capture them — and with none of the hard work of actually competing in the market. This is why many people, including those in the private sector, like the state.

The second important truth is that these political privileges are much more likely to be captured by those who already have financial and political power. Despite the fantasy believed by so many that government regulation and other interventions are all about constraining the rich and powerful in the name of the masses, in fact a great deal of government regulation is driven by the desires of those same rich and powerful to become more so. The more power we give to government, the more power we are giving to those with the money and connections to access political power. In other words, expanding the state gives more power and privilege to the powerful and privileged.

The last truth is that when private-sector actors seek to use political privileges to enhance their profits, they often do so by blocking smaller competitors’ access to the market, or by raising their costs of competing. When Walmart supports a higher minimum wage, it thereby favors raising the costs for their small mom-and-pop rivals. When taxicab companies defend their monopoly privileges, they intend to shut firms like Uber and Lyft out of the market altogether. When entrenched hairdressers demand that hair braiders be licensed, the established practitioners mean to raise their competitors’ costs or shut them out altogether.

When we put all three of these truths together, we get a story about the way in which those who already have wealth and power can and do make use of the state to block the upward mobility of their poorer, less-powerful potential competitors. Small-business owners, Uber and Lyft drivers, and African-American women who want to open hair-braiding businesses are trying to grab on to the bottom rungs of the income ladder and work their way up. These are the very people — start-up entrepreneurs and the working poor — that those critical of the market claim to care about.

In a world where government has all of these powers to intervene in markets, rent-seeking and cronyism are inevitable. Regulation will ensure that those who know the right people can tilt the regulatory playing field in their favor. The result will be a worsening of the income inequality that concerns so many. The rich will get richer through rent-seeking and cronyism, and they will do so at the expense of the poor and relatively powerless. If rent-seeking and cronyism worsen income inequality, and the source of rent-seeking and cronyism is the state’s ability to intervene, then a pretty good case can be made that freed markets will give us a world with less income inequality than the status quo.

Libertarians are right to point out that inequalities of income are not inherently bad. If the existing pattern of incomes were the result of a truly freed market (like in the famous, if simplified, Wilt Chamberlain example in Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia), there would be no reason for worry. This is especially true because in a freed market, dynamic change would ensure that the same people do not occupy the same rungs on the ladder from year to year.

However, if inequalities are instead the result of a mixed economy in which those who already have wealth and power can enhance it at the expense of those with less — not to mention the consumers who lose out on the benefits of greater competition and lower prices, then libertarians are right to object and look for solutions. Of course, asking for more state action to combat state-driven inequalities is unlikely to work and very likely to make matters worse.

Thus, we can ground our arguments against government intervention in the market in our desire to reduce inequalities that are not the result of voluntary exchanges that benefit both parties.

Finally, this whole argument gives libertarians another reason to love the sharing economy of Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, and the rest. Not only are such companies providing important competition for established firms and thereby lowering prices and bringing better services and more options to consumers, they are also part of the fight against the unearned privileges of the rich and powerful and the fight against politically driven, and therefore unjustified, increases in income inequality.

Classical liberalism needs to reassert its long-standing commitment to progressive goals, even as it rejects the means preferred by most so-called progressives today. We have an opportunity to bring new allies to our cause by recognizing the interrelationships among rent-seeking, cronyism, the sharing economy, small businesspeople, and income inequality. Let’s not overlook it.

Standard & Poor’s: Runaway Inequality Dampens GDP Growth, Leads to Boom/Bust Cycles and Discourages Trade, Investment and Hiring

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Source: Washington’s Blog

Inequality Also Dampens Social Mobility, Increases Political Pressure and Produces a Less Competitive Workforce

Standard & Poor’s released a report on inequality today, concluding:

Higher levels of income inequality increase political pressures, discouraging trade, investment, and hiring. Keynes first showed that income inequality can lead affluent households (Americans included) to increase savings and decrease consumption (1), while those with less means increase consumer borrowing to sustain consumption…until those options run out. When these imbalances can no longer be sustained, we see a boom/bust cycle such as the one that culminated in the Great Recession (2).

Aside from the extreme economic swings, such income imbalances tend to dampen social mobility and produce a less-educated workforce that can’t compete in a changing global economy. This diminishes future income prospects and potential long-term growth, becoming entrenched as political repercussions extend the problems.

Our review of the data, as well as a wealth of research on this matter, leads us to conclude that the current level of income inequality in the U.S. is dampening GDP growth, at a time when the world’s biggest economy is struggling to recover from the Great Recession and the government is in need of funds to support an aging population.

S&P joins many others in concluding that runaway inequality hurts the economy, including:

  • Former U.S. Secretary of Labor and UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich
  • Global economy and development division director at Brookings and former economy minister for Turkey, Kemal Dervi
  • Societe Generale investment strategist and former economist for the Bank of England, Albert Edwards
  • Michael Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers
  • Former executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Policy Development, and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, Bruce Bartlett
  • Deputy Division Chief of the Modeling Unit in the Research Department of the IMF, Michael Kumhof

Even the father of free market economics – Adam Smith – didn’t believe that inequality should be a taboo subject.

Numerous investors and entrepreneurs agree that runaway inequality hurts the economy, including:

Indeed, extreme inequality helped cause the Great Depression, the current financial crisis … and the fall of the Roman Empire . And inequality in America today is twice as bad as in ancient Rome, worse than it was in Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republics in Latin America, and worse than experienced by slaves in 1774 colonial America. (More stunning facts.)

Bad government policy – which favors the fatcats at the expense of the average American – is largely responsible for our runaway inequality.

And yet the powers-that-be in Washington and Wall Street are accelerating the redistribution of wealth from the lower, middle and more modest members of the upper classes to the super-elite.

Collapsing Standard of Living: Kleptocrats and Militarists Fleece Americans

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By Prof. James Petras

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

American living standards are plunging and it’s not simply because they are paid less, work longer (or shorter hours) under highly stressful workplace conditions and pay a higher percentage of their income for health and pension coverage.  The ‘workplace’ is only one of several locations where American working people are experiencing a sharp decline in living standards.  The new oligarchical Kleptocrats and political elites have elaborated new ways to fleece Americans.  These include: 

(1)   Increased costs and declining quality of internet, cable and other communication systems.

(2)   Intensive pervasive and perpetual surveillance by punitive espionage agencies eroding personal freedoms and violating the confidentiality of personal, political and business decisions affecting everyday life.

(3)   Large scale, repeated financial swindles by the most active and influential private and publicly trading investment companies resulting in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars in pensions and savings for tens of millions of middle and working class investors.

(4)   Increases in taxes and charges, including sales taxes, social security deductions, medical co-payments and reductions in social services.  This is a result of the government’s commitment to finance US corporate investments and bail-outs.  Big business hoards their cash holdings abroad to avoid taxes on overseas profits.  To pay dividends they borrow.  The growth of corporate debt, concentrated in a few large corporations, holds the US taxpayer liable for any present or future collapse of the financial markets.  This corporate-induced ‘hoarding of capital’ compromises present and future living standards.  It plays a major role in the deterioration of employment, wages, social services and public infrastructure.

(5)   The astronomical growth of state spending on wars of conquest, financial giveaways propping up right-wing dictatorships and building a vast network of global military bases, proxy wars and other empire building measures reduce living standards of Americans.  By militarizing everyday life, citizens are subject to mindless repetitive propaganda designed to lower their mental capacity.  State terror-mongering propagandists in the mass media distract citizens from their declining living standards.  Political elites bully citizens to continue ‘sacrificing’ basic living standards.  Video games reproduce the worlds of war and terror, reflecting the real world policies of the ruling class.

Video games allow Americans who know they no longer have influence on political decisions and whose living standards are in decline, to vicariously exercise power and realize favorable outcomes on their mobiles.  Purchasing mobiles, video games and other gadgets enrich billionaires’— so-called “high tech” capitalists – and convert citizens into impoverished consumers.  They inhabit a bubble of illusions and passivity in the face of growing economic inequalities and political-cultural impoverishment.

The Political Bases of Declining Living Standards

The case of Comcast, the communication monopoly’s seizure of internet, is illustrative of how politics and plunder converge.  Comcast TWC, the largest communications company, presently will control 40% of the US broadband and one-third of the US cable television market.  By controlling the internet, Comcast will monopolize the principal means of communication of most Americans.  The Federal Communications Commissions (FCC), which is supposed to regulate the industry and prevent price gouging monopolies, is “dominated by senior former industry officials” (Financial Times, (FT) 4/14/, pg. 9).  Almost every elected national politician from Obama down has received substantial campaign funds from Comcast.  During Senate hearings on Comcast’s bid to monopolize the internet through the take-over of Time Warner Cable, Comcast CEO David Cohen smirked and brushed off the Senators puff-questions.  FCC complicity, Senatorial whitewashing of the private monopoly, is only part of the story.  The internet was developed largely by public funds as was Google’s search engine:  the public sector took  the risk and the private monopolists , in this case Comcast, harvest the profits.

Comcast charges Americans several times greater then what it costs to use the internet in Sweden, South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere.  Yet, US average internet speed is as little as a tenth as fast as that in Japan.  In other words the hundreds of millions of US citizens who rely on the internet spend more money for less internet quality in their work day and everyday life.  Their work life is intensified, their free time is reduced and their living standards are diminished.  With greater concentration of ownership, come greater inequalities in power and income, and a greater disparity of living standards.  All of which is obscured by the main beneficiaries – the communication barons and their political cronies.

Declining Living Standards in the Era of the Police State

‘Living’ in the deepest and most intimate sense of the term, means the ability to share ideas, feelings and experiences with individuals, families, friends and citizens  without the intrusive and pervasive presence of a punitive state apparatus.  When a state spy apparatus intercepts, collects, files, analyzes and makes a police evaluation of citizen’s communications, scientists refer to it as a police-state.  The gigantic growth of a police state and its permeation of civil society has dramatically changed for the worse the fundamental bases of inter-personal life and communications.  Police state rule, has sharply deteriorated cultural, social, political and economic living conditions.  The ‘standards’ for living have been harshly reduced.  The ‘legal’, but arbitrary, executive prerogatives of the state have been enhanced.  The parameters of the basic rights of citizens have shrunk.  As police state expenditures grow and the subjects of surveillance increase, so do budgets and taxes.

Kleptocracy:  The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Marx and Marxists for the greater part of the 19th and 20th century, focused on capital’s exploitation of labor and the resources of overseas colonies and neo-colonies.  In the 21st century a new more dynamic and totally parasitic form of economy has emerged based in the dominant financial sector.  Kleptocrats engaged in large-scale, perpetual financial swindles and the pillage of the public treasury greatly impoverish  small  investors, and the pension funds of  employees and workers.

For the better part of two decades, major financial institutions have been engaged in systematic large scale swindles, involving the sale of fraudulent financial packets (dubbed ironically “securities”), profiteering based on insider trading and other illicit activity which is prejudicial to productive activity, investors, tax payers, salary, and wage workers.

Every major investment banks in the US and Europe has been repeatedly investigated, fined and rarely prosecuted.  They pay a relatively light fine and return to criminal activity.  Looking only at the mega-swindles, involving hundreds of billions of dollars, we would include Enron, the Information Tech “bubble” of the 1990’s to 2000, the Home Mortgage fraud, the Barron, Lehman and Bear Sterns scam. In the run-up to the 2008-9 financial crash , Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America were part of the “pump and dump” of low grade home mortgage bonds and equities.  The swindlers are recidivists and are so because of the complicity of top Government officials at every moment.  State officials design the rules promoting Kleptocracy (deregulation), suspend safeguards, provide tax incentives, and eliminate risk via trillion dollar bailouts of the biggest investment kleptocrats when the swindlers cannibalize their assets and run out of new victims to swindle.

Under kleptocratic capitalism the apex of the system is occupied by the top fifty investment banks, hedge funds and speculators who ‘make markets’.  They determine what ‘stocks or investment objects are targeted, to be pumped or dumped, at what rate and for what period of time.  The entire activity of the kleptocratic elite has nothing to do with financing the ‘real economy’.  Kleptocrats creates paper ‘values’ – paper assets at paper prices, for real victims and huge profits.  The kleptocratic system operates like a chain.  Kleptocratic speculators extract the savings and investments of a second tier of financial houses. They draw on real resources:  savings, trust and pension funds.  The second tier speculators are the ‘bag men’ for the dominant kleptocrats and they receive a minor share of the booty in exchange for conning the savings of producers.  They write the prospectus to entice investment funds; they formulate the promise of lucrative returns. They send progress reports to clients in exchange for ‘commissions. They also ‘take the rap”, when the crises hits and bankruptcies, foreclosures and scams unfold.

The pension funds, the individual trusts and savings of workers and employees, resulting from decades of creating value in the real economy, forms the base of the pyramid.  They have no influence on the political officials who promote, protect and bailout the kleptocrats.  Under the kleptocratic elite ideology of “too big to fail”, the state eliminates all the risk for the klepto’s and imposes the losses on the second tier, who pass the losses on to the wage and salaried workers as taxpayers, via trillion dollar transfers from Treasury. Investors suffer  via the loss of equity;  workers via the loss of jobs, homes, income and social services.  Given the vast chasm between the perpetual fraudulent transactions in the mega paper economy and the daily work routines at the bottom, there is great uncertainty, volatility, and insecurity in the work-life of the wage and salaried classes.  The uncertainty and capriciousness of the ‘normal’ capitalist economic cycle, is vastly exacerbated by the turbulence caused by the mega-swindles, endless frauds and crooked trades, endemic to the kleptocratic stage of capital.

Kleptocrats and Militarists Together:  They Shall Overcome

Just as kleptocrats rule the paper economy, political confidence men and women engage in imperial wars prejudicing the real economy.  Imperial militarists extract wealth from the Treasury (the taxpayer) via perpetual political swindles.  Imperial invasions and interventions of sovereign countries are ‘sold’ to the taxpayers as “wars on terror”; non-nuclear Iran is sold as a nuclear threat; the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Ukraine government by a pro Washington junta is sold as a “democratic transition”.  Just as the kleptocracy’s “driving force” is repeated, large scale swindles, so the governing militarist elite’s “driving force” is the perpetual need to engage in warfare.

The ‘bridge’ between the kleptocrats and the militarists is the respectable financial press (Financial Times (FT), the Wall Street Journal(WSJ).  They publicize and praise high level paper transactions (buy outs and mergers) and encourage imperial warfare everywhere and all the time.  They editorialize in favor of wars which destroys lucrative trade and investment markets in the real economy because they are aligned with the kleptocrats   linked to the paper economy.  The Financial Times should change its name to the Military Times.  The editors and columnists have supported wars destroying the Libyan, Iraq, Syrian and Ukrainian economies and back sanctions prejudicing trade with Iran.  The financial press no longer promotes market relations of the real economy; it is embedded in the paper economy of the kleptos.

Kleptocratic activities have become ‘routinized’ and based on advanced technology and have created highly respected billionaires.  Even as I write today (4/14/14) the FT reports that ‘insiders at some of the hottest private and publically traded web companies sold big personal stakes before the slump in stock companies’ (my emphasis) taking advantage of a bubble of their own creation (“pump”) to reap billions at the expense of small investors.  Tell it to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, who sold at the pre-slump peak, prior to the tech bubble bursting

Domestic Corporate Debt and Overseas Corporate Tax Havens

According to Standards and Poor (S and P), the rating agency, “the biggest US companies have added significantly to their debts during the past three years, at the same time as corporate cash piles have increased” (FT 4/14/14).  The total cash holding of the 1,100 companies rated by S and P rose by $204 billion to 1.23 trillion between 2010-13.  However, during the same time span their gross debts grew fivefold, rising from $748 billion to $4 trillion.  Their net debt (gross debt minus cash holdings) rose 24 percent to $2.78 trillion.  By holding cash overseas, US corporations avoid domestic taxes – increasing fiscal pressures, the tax burden on domestic producers and workers, heightening the regressive nature of the tax system  Secondly, by loading up on domestic debt, the corporate elite crowds out local borrowers.  Piling up debt increases corporate vulnerability to bankruptcy if and when interest rates rise.  The corporate elite evading taxes via overseas cash piles include Apple, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Chevron, and Merck among others.  All told the top 25 multi nationals account for 43 percent of the total debt (FT 4/14/14).

Hoarding profits overseas avoids taxes.  High domestic indebtedness results from the need to pay dividends and inflate returns to big shareholders.  In other words, corporate elites escape taxes and increase economic insecurity for domestic job holders, both of which contribute to a decline in the material and psychological dimensions of ‘living standards’.

Kleptocracy and Militarism:  Declining Living Standards

The rise of a powerful kleptocratic economic elite which ‘interpenetrates’ and shares power with a militarist political elite have joined forces to pillage the productive economy and the US Treasury.  Their powerful links are the main reason for heightening class inequalities, political and social insecurities.  They have driven American society into a permanent state of crises and wars. Over the past quarter century, Americans have lived through two major economic crashes, prolonged periods of stagnation and declining income, three major wars and a multitude of overt and covert military operations – all of which have eroded living standards.

Military propaganda saturates the mass media and permeates all mass spectacles. Stock reports, dominate the economic news.  Investment speculators and swindlers are presented as cultural heroes.  The gap between elite opinion and interests and those of the majority of citizens widens.

This leads politicians to greater dependence on billionaire campaign funders.  The electoral process is unabashedly and totally controlled by the economic oligarchy. The vast majority of Americans recognizes and publically admit their total lack of political influence on all public issues of interest including those privileging the kleptocrats and the warlords.

The deeply felt and pervasive malaise resulting from social impotence in vital spheres of life is the clearest expression of the decline of political living standards.  The shrinking of public involvement, the narrow focus of isolated individuals manipulating computerized gadgets , the replacement of face to face public engagement by impersonal electronic communications, are an expression of the decline of social living standards.  The rise of ethno-religious chauvinism among klepto-elites is matched by the political warlords’ reliance on systematic deception and espionage of American citizens. Warlords and kleptocrats are enclosed in privileged living enclaves, including the private appropriation of former public spaces, but their  intrusion into private communications define the diminished world of everyday life for the most Americans.  Life expectancy may have increased but human life has decreased, drastically, over the past quarter of a century.

Conclusion

Blood and gore does not drip off the Saville suited clever inside trader.  They never see or hear their victims, nor do they have an interest in them, except to fleece them collectively and anonymously.

America is ruled by a division of labor. The financial speculators, corporate tax evaders, investment bankers – the kleptocratic ruling class– pillage the treasury and productive economy.  Their political counterparts manipulate, distract and police their exploited victims – to ensure that they submit or are intimidated if they protest.

When they political elites come up short, there are the new “opiums of the people’ videos, painkillers, terror threats, entertainment and sports spectacles.

But citizens are restless– as living standards continue to decline.  Nobody believes in bailing out speculators because they are ‘too big to fail”.  Nobody trusts the political leaders who lied their way to twelve year wars, adding others along the way.  No one follows media pundit extremists in defense of kleptocrats and warlords.  Passive resistance is widespread because it is clear to most Americans that living standards are in a free fall.  Time awaits a popular backlash. Will it happen in our lifetime?

Swiss to Vote on Basic Income for All

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Switzerland is one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita, and also one of the most democratic. It’s the only European country with true direct democracy in which all citizens have to do is gather 100,000 signatures calling for a vote to hold a nationwide referendum with a binding result. Last November, Swiss citizens created the so-called 1:12 referendum, which would limit the wages of top executives so they couldn’t earn more in a month than lower paid employees do in a year. That proposal lost the vote, but early next year they’ll have an opportunity to decide on an equally radical referendum: a $2,800 basic income for every adult, whether employed or unemployed. There is currently no minimum wage in Switzerland, but there will also be a vote on that next year.

Anger about salaries and fairness has surged among Swiss voters because some of their biggest banks including UBS are responsible for speculative investment bubbles and continue to pay top executives huge bonuses while reporting huge losses. According to Bloomberg News, Switzerland is home to at least five of Europe’s top 20 paid executives. The inequality pay ratio in Switzerland is 1:194 (while in the U. S., average CEO to average worker compensation was 1:243 in 2010).

The idea of a Basic Income or Universal Wages are not only supported by Marxists and Communists, but have have been gaining traction among Libertarians as well. A great post at Thought Infection recently made an argument for such proposals from a civil libertarian perspective:

Freedom in the 21st century should mean freedom from having to engage in productive work simply to meet your basic needs for comfort and dignity. 

At one time, the ready availability of jobs amply filled the need for a basic access to a comfortable and dignified life, but precipitous technological and economic changes erode this dynamic further each day. The function of the economy has never been to provide gainful employment to people, but simply to provide material goods. As the economy manages to produce more with less human labor, we must create new mechanisms aimed specifically that maintaining and raising the minimum level of comfort and dignity to everyone in a society…

…Worse than just being immoral, the desperate poverty of the lower classes is both immoral and useless. It is not a lack of money that compels the great successes of the modern age, but rather the availability of opportunities. It is because healthy, well-fed people were able to get a good education that allowed us to realize the great miracles of the modern age (eg, the internet, smart phones, Google, etc…). 

We must rebalance the right of society to compel people into productive work with the obligation of society to support its citizens. It should be noted that basic income is not aimed at the unrealisitic and undesirable goal of unfettered access for all to every luxury of the world. Freedom from work does not mean the right to luxury; it simply sets a baseline below which no person should fall. Basic income seeks to strike a fair balance between allowing the benefit of work to coexist with a system aimed at delivering dignity and opportunity for all in a society.

Beyond just better enabling access to opportunities, basic income will also allow people the freedom to live as they choose; to explore unpaid work in the form of volunteering, participating in creative projects, or starting new business ventures. Some argue that there would be less incentive for people to start businesses and be productive, but it could just as easily be argued that it would remove the disincentive from the high-risk, high-reward ventures that are so valuable to modern society…

…Requiring people to live so much of their life working simply to earn a basic income is a waste of human potential and bad for progress. By eliminating the obligation to work just for simple survival, basic income would allow a new dynamic expansion of human freedom and human potential.

A society compelled to perfect cohesion and homogeneity lacks the dynamism to compete in the modern world. New ideas can only come into being at the chaotic interface between contrasting worldviews and lifestyles. In a world where progress is completely reliant on our ability to innovate and create new ideas, we should be seeking to maximize the spectrum of lifestyles which can be expressed within the society. By removing the need to work just to live, we will let people explore their true potential, and we will realize the untold benefits of a new dynamism.  

And this brings us to the real reason that I think basic income will happen soon, not only because it is morally the right thing to do (which it is), but because it makes good sense economically. Just as slavery ended when factories made the economic model of slavery obsolete, we will move towards basic income because it makes good economic sense for the modern innovation economy.

Dynamic, creative and competitive economies of today must seek to stretch the social fabric to its limits. Basic income will serve to reinforce this fabric and enable the risky ventures that will power us forward in the 21st century.

Read the full article here: http://thoughtinfection.com/2013/12/15/basic-income-means-basic-freedom/