Providing The Infrastructure For Everyone – An Alternative To Minimal Income

Providing the infrastructure for everyone – an alternative to minimal income

What I am writing here is an alternative to the ideas of Minimal Income as we have to find new ways to handle the distribution of wealth and our entire infrastructure.

 

What will happen, when 50% of our population will lose their job?

 

You think you are entitled and will get away with it? Security and entitlement is a dangerous place to be!!

 

We will not get around it, to find a way to provide the basic infrastructure for anybody! You want people marching in the streets?

Better act before this will be the case as they probably kill the beautiful things we have achieved.

 

 

There are many different initiatives in different countries to find a solution to the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

Until now I see ideas circling around an approach to dictate a minimum income from a political side. In our capitalistic world, this is a dangerous approach, attached to the ideologies of socialism and it can break the innovation to build startups and kill small companies, the backbone of our capitalism.

We see it in France, where it is difficult to fire employees due to them being protected by the law. If a company loses its business due to any circumstances it gets into real trouble if there is no possibility to reduce the workforce.

 

At its extremes, I witness this issue in Cuba under a socialist regime, where the creation of independent companies is not even covered by the law and the state is completely in charge of the entire economy. Now and then they opened up possibilities to enable independent startups since the death of Fidel Castro but they use to close these windows fast when people start gaining wealth.

The result is frustrating as there is just no progression of the economy and in an environment where everybody earns the same, there is no reason for people to provide their creativity, power, ideology and risk their own wealth. This is the main reason why the abstract concept of communism cannot work.

In Switzerland, small and middle-sized companies are the basis of our economy. We rely strongly on the big players in the financial sector and pharma but these smaller players are a substantial part of the economy. I identify our vulnerability in the dependence of many of the small players by delivering services for the big players, so if the big get into turbulences the entire economy of the state gets in danger. We have been there during the financial crises in 2007 and got out of troubles by luck while current lawsuits tell us, it is not over yet.

I am conscious that we have a history concerning the wealth generated, mainly after world-war 2, where the role of Switzerland is ethically hard to justify. Nazi Germany was surrounded by enemies and Switzerland took over the function of providing a place of trade for gold, art and other wealth stolen from the discriminated and tortured ethnos. There was a process of rehabilitation going on in Switzerland but our position in this tragedy will never be justifiable.

My grandfather was part of the generation to defend the frontier to Germany during the war and I remember him to be traumatized by these experiences for his entire life. He truly believed that Switzerland was not taken by the Nazis at the time due to our military defense. Maybe he justified the difficult time in his personal life to avoid digging into this trauma.

I remember in my rebel years arguing with him about the Swiss position to be a strategic partner of Nazi Germany when I studied both world-wars in-depth, mainly interested in the strategic changes and evolution of the deadly concepts applied.

We can not unmake our position but I claim to be conscious about the reality of where our wealth started to grow.

Now we are in a position where our political system and very unique democracy are very stable and our currency doesn’t seem to stop gaining value in comparison to Euro, Pound, Dollar, Yen and many more.

 

 

I would like to make the following very clear! 

Stability is our asset and the reason for our current wealth here in Switzerland. Current discussions and negotiations with our political partners, where the extreme sides of right and left take a stupid position of megalomania, trying to defend ideologies are very dangerous while a lot is at stake.

Fear of the people in many places around the world is a fact. It is based in a mix of helplessness about how to deal with the impacts of digitalization, the growing gap in wealth between rich and poor, the global migration we face, the impotence of our democratic system, the complexity of our entire system and many more problems we face in our daily lives as a consequence.

In Switzerland, we have the chance to be covered at least partly by a strong social system while in other nations there is no solution in sight to cover poverty of all age classes, job-loss, healthcare and missing pensions for those who worked hard during their entire lives.

We can see the fear and anger in the movement of the yellow-jackets in France, marching and protesting against a political establishment of Emanuel Macron while he is definitely not one of the bad guys. Populist leaders trigger this fear and anger with simple paroles to gain political power and unite these destructive forces while their solutions simply lack practicality.

We can see this in England, where the Brexit is probably the most stupid thing ever decided, in Italy where the current populist leaders are working in a similar direction, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and even Sweden is being infiltrated by populist paroles lacking any connection to reality.

 

 

How could we make this stop and provide solutions?

I would like to draw an idea of a picture to provide a different approach to the problem.

What if we would work on the basis of providing an environment for everyone by financing it through the political states through taxes from the service industry as we already do.

Let’s suppose the state would take care of all major bricks we need to live a good life.

We are in a position where robots paired with the power of AI will soon be able to construct buildings and most of the infrastructure as roads, public transportation, electricity, coverage of internet, healthcare, pension and a lot more while optimizing how we use our precious goods.

I leave it open for discussion, what parts of the infrastructure should be identified as absolutely needed to live a good life. If we would decide to make a step in such a direction we would face a transition process anyway.

Currently, the workforce providing these parts of the infrastructure as a service is afraid to lose their jobs while a construction worker puts his health at risk constantly, probably causing more costs in healthcare than what he generated in income during his lifetime.

Let’s not fear the robots but use them to avoid the hard work nobody wants to do anyway and it is just done out of the necessity to earn an income to maintain our life financially while we had no robots to help us with these tasks in the past.

I don’t care if somebody sits at home and doesn’t want to work. This is seen as a parasite in the current society because of our outdated ideology to connect work to the value of a person.

If the states would commit to providing the infrastructure needed through taxes, we would create enough work anyway.

Most human beings want to work and find happiness and prosperity by doing so and I doubt we run out of problems to solve. The opposite is the case, we need everybody we can get to work, while we should change our idea of value.

Those who work can still get more money out of the system and gain possibilities by providing a service to our society and capitalize their service to benefit from anything already available in our service driven society.

By creating such an infrastructure we could focus on businesses to reduce stress, anxiety and all these problems created through our capitalistic approach, where people struggle with the fear of falling into a deep hole and becoming a social case, a failure, and a parasite. If someone gets there it is very difficult to get out of such a situation.

 

 

Let’s work on things that really matter like taking care of our environment. We are focused on dumb, stupid and outdated values on a private level.

These outdated ideas create companies, trying to trick the system and gaining pseudo services we actually don’t need.

What I am describing is just an idea but according to the current development, we will have to face a mindset shift on a political level to avoid a collapse of the system we created through a lot of work, energies and with the best intentions.

I can not stress this enough, we have a lot to lose here in Switzerland, Europe and the US and China is providing an example of how these problems could be attacked.

I know about all the negative side effect of controlling the people in Chinese society and I share a certain fear that our individualism and creativity could be compromised.

What I fear even more is the stagnation due to the problem of the slow progress concerning political decision in a strong democracy where solutions have to find a majority in the sovereign, being the people of the nation.

 

Will this system of democracy be fast enough or will it destroy those values we are trying to solve?

 

 

#minimalincome #infrastructure #leadership #transformation #digitalization #environment