Johan Nygren — Universal Basic Income on a Co-Op Dividend Scheme

Human beings, and Bonobos and Chimpanzees, and all species that niche as cultural beings through the use of memes, have an innate drive to share their abundance. In scarcity, primates are competitive and will kill for the scarce resources that they need, but with abundance, the resources are instead invested in the other. In environments of abundance, the most resilient way for primates to exist is through sharing.

Kins have always shared their surplus. Translated into modern civilization, we’ve created states that mediate the distribution of surplus. But there is also another organisational entity that distributes surplus, but on a smaller scale — the co-operatives.

These co-operatives use a business model where they invest their surplus into their community of costumers. This creates a more resilient community as costumers receive a form of safety net, and it also gives co-operatives a competitive edge as costumers have incentives to harness dividends.

The pattern here is that human relationship where profit flows from powerful to dependent do exist. Streams of shared profit do exist. Streams of basic incomedo exist.

If a model for citizen dividends already exists, might it be possible to improve on it ?

Basicincome.co(op) is an attempt to do that…..

basicincome.co
Universal Basic Income on a Co-Op Dividend Scheme
Johan Nygren, inventor of the Bitnation DApp Basicincome.co

James Mackenzie — Pope Francis attacks ‘throw-away’ economic globalization

Pope Francis launched a fresh attack on economic injustice on Saturday, condemning the “throw-away culture” of globalization and calling for new ways of thinking about poverty, welfare, employment and society. 

In a speech to the association of Italian cooperative movements, he pointed to the “dizzying rise in unemployment” and the problems that existing welfare systems had in meeting healthcare needs. 

For those living “at the existential margins” the current social and political system “seems fatally destined to suffocate hope and increase risks and threats,” he said.
The Argentinian-born pope, who has often criticized orthodox market economics for fostering unfairness and inequality, said people were forced to work long hours, sometimes in the black economy, for a few hundred euros a month because they were seen as easily replaceable. 

“‘You don’t like it? Go home then’. What can you do in a world that works like this? Because there’s a queue of people looking for work. If you don’t like it, someone else will,” he said in an unscripted change from the text of his speech. 

“It’s hunger, hunger that makes us accept what they give us,” he said..

“When money becomes an idol, it commands the choices of man. And thus it ruins man and condemns him. It makes him a slave,” he said. 

“Money at the service of life can be managed in the right way by cooperatives, on condition that it is a real cooperative where capital does not have command over men but men over capital,” he said [addressing the cooperative movement].

One America News Network
Pope Francis attacks ‘throw-away’ economic globalization

James Mackenzie