Today is MLK day.  I suggest you take at least a few minutes to peruse the text or audio of some of his speeches.  This link  can lead you to several.

King is less known for his wisdom beyond the quest for racial equality.  One of the most timely passages can be found in one of his last works “Where Do We Go From Here.”  The chapter is quoted more fully here .  Although I doubt the efficacy of a guaranteed income he advocates here, I found some parallels to today’s debate about the increasing wealth inequality. 

Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.

Funny that this thinking is still found early in this century, too.  It lurks behind every utterance of “Get a job!”

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.

We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.

We’re worse off now, having masterd production so much that we’ve mastered the ability to have it shipped off to be done by the more easily exploited foreign poor.  This results in even less hope for the growth in income for the American poor.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.

Turns out we were made consumers, not through full employment, but through easier access to credit.  Now our potential is wasted as we are chained to burdensome debt. 

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.

This stressful uncertainty of the working classes during the great recession is the source of the populist uprisings whether it’s Occupy or Tea Party. 

 
Our nation’s adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits.

We’re still squeezing the middle with lower wages and more debt.

John Kenneth Galbraith has estimated that $20 billion a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he describes as “not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by ‘experts’ in Vietnam.”

Today we waste those billions (and hundreds of billions more) on the War on Terror, enriching defense contractors instead of using it to make America great again.

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

Outstanding writing!  I hope he enjoyed writing it as much as I did reading it. 

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

The cannibalism at the dawn of civilization may be socially cruel and blind, but it reminds me of the freedom longed for by many of today’s libertarians and oligarchs.