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from the handouts-instead-of-gov't-jobs-or-worker-owned-cooperatives dept.
Common Dreams reports
As a way to improve living standards and boosts its economy, the nation of Finland is moving closer towards offering[1] all of its adult citizens a basic permanent income of approximately 800 euros per month.
[...] The monthly allotment would replace other existing social benefits, but is an idea long advocated for by progressive-minded social scientists and economists as a solution--counter-intuitive as it may first appear at first--that actually decreases government expenditures while boosting both productivity, quality of life, and unemployment.
[...] The basic income proposal, put forth by the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, known as KELA, would see every adult citizen "receive 800 euros ($876) a month, tax free, that would replace existing benefits. Full implementation would be preceded by a pilot stage, during which the basic income payout would be 550 euros and some benefits would remain."
[...] Under the current welfare system, a person gets less in benefits if they take up temporary, low-paying or part-time work--which can result in an overall loss of income.
[...] As Quartz reports, previous experiments with a basic income have shown promising results:
Everyone in the Canadian town of Dauphin was given a stipend from 1974 to 1979, and though there was a drop in working hours,[PDF] this was mainly because men spent more time in school and women took longer maternity leaves. Meanwhile, when thousands of unemployed people in Uganda were given unsupervised grants of twice their monthly income, working hours increased by 17% and earnings increased by 38%.
[1] Link to The Independent in TFA was redundant IMO.
...and, before anyone shouts SOCIALISM!, this is actually Liberal Democracy (of the Bernie Sanders type).
An actual move toward Socialism would subsidize the formation of worker-owned cooperatives. An initiative to do that was floated in 1980. 5 percent of taxes would have gone into a pool (kinda like USA's Social Security fund). The Finns rejected it. Source: Prof. Richard Wolff
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @12:50PM
So would I, and many others on this site, I believe. However, we do not represent society as a whole.
Through human evolution, there were three functions: Leaders, warriors and explorers. Leaders made the decisions, warriors did the work (war, hunting, building huts), and explorers went off on their own, only returning once in a while to tell the tribe about that area they just found with plenty of fruit, berries and animals to eat. It would then be up to the leaders to make the decision whether or not to move the tribe to the new area.
In modern society, the leaders became managers and the warriors became workers. The explorers, however, don't really fit into modern society. Some become inventors, some build startups, and then leave when the company gets large enough that they start to need managers, but the rest of us are either forced to become workers or become unemployed.
However, warriors/workers were always the majority. Explorers were more like the leaders in numbers, and we already have a society that tolerates management doing no real work, and getting paid (a lot) for it.
As I said, in our current society, most explorers end up forced to become workers. At the same time, some workers become unemployed. This is a problem for their mental health, they end up with depression and similar health problems.
For every explorer that willingly leaves his job, we can have a previously unemployed worker replace him, and thus the mental health of both of them improves.
Less mental health problems, less crime, and if the cost is that the leaders need to pay a bit more tax, I'm all for it.