Debate: Is Basic Income a Human Right??
Side: Yes!

A Basic Income is becoming a human right because without it, our societies will fail. We must implement a Basic Income or perish. Democracies are based on a balance of power. Capitalism has produced great economic growth, but as we add innovations and technology to capitalism, inequality has expanded in step with our growth. The balance of power in our society is failing because of technology driven inequality. A Basic Income is required to restore the balance of power and save our society. If we do not implement it, the growing inequality will destroy our democracy, and return our society back into a plutocracy where the rich freely abuse the poor. This is the very thing we in America, fought a revolution 200 years ago, to escape. If we don't implement a Basic Income, we will have to go fight that battle once again.Humans are sadly, selfish creatures by nature. We act to care for our own self interest more so than we act to care for others. We learn our altruistic values not because we are good to each other by our nature, but because we learn the real life consequences of not being altruistic. If we are mean towards others, they in turn, are mean back to us, often more so than we were to them. When we are nice to others, they are nice back to us, often more so than our kindness to them. We train each other, to be altruistic. Our society is full of altruistic behaviors, because we have all trained each other, to be that way. And it's beneficial to all of us, to learn these lessons.But this training only works, when we have equality of power. When power is unequal, the strong, in the end, will always learn to abuse the weak. The weak, will fail to be able to punish the strong, as much as the strong, will be able to punish the weak. A society of inherently selfish individuals only works well, when a balance of power is maintained.We created democratic societies, after long lessons of what life was like in societies structured as power hierarchies. Freedom only comes, as a result of the equality of power in society.We use free trade and capitalism as the tool for maximizing the use, and allocation, of all the worlds resources for meeting the needs of the people in our society. But capitalism, is inherently a system where power is not balanced. In capitalism, power naturally flows to whoever proves themselves to be the most economically productive members of society. This is very good, for the maximizing of economic output, but very bad, for the balance of power. A trade off between economic strength, and social equality, must be struck and maintained to keep the society healthy.Since the beginning of time, human labor has been the prime force within the economy for creating wealth. We created it with our physical and mental effort. Because most humans have similar physical and mental abilities, the wealth any human could produce was always very close to one another. There was little inequality, except when people choose not to try to work. This fact is what allowed capitalistic free trade to produce relatively low levels of inequality. Every healthy normal human, had the power to create wealth, in their own hands.The only exception to this, was the control of land. Farming, and hunting, required access to land. So if one could control the access to land, they could control the production of wealth. This led to the landed gentry extracting wealth from society and abusing the workers. But yet, the landed gentry still needed the labor of the peasants and as such, this always gave the peasants some leverage to keep some of the wealth their labor produced. At least enough, to keep themselves alive and healthy enough to keep farming.But today, our economy is a very different story. We have added massive amounts of new technology to it. Today, most the work in fact is no longer done by humans at all. It's done by the machines. Farming is no longer done by hand, or by animal, it's done by tractors, and combines, and water pumps. 200 years ago, 90% of the people worked in farming, now only 2%, and we produce far more food. This is because 99% of the work is now done by the machines, and not the humans.With the invention of steam engines, and then internal combustion engines and electric motors, we displaced human and animal muscle power from the economy. Our muscle power was obsoleted just like the buggy whip. Human muscle power became economically worthless. But humans remained economically valuable, because we still had this other wonderful organ called a brain. Every engine, needed a human brain to control it. Now, as computers and automation advance, we are rapidly displacing the human brain from the economy as well. Best estimates are that we only have about 2 decades left before cheap computers surpass human brain power and at that point, we are obsoleted from our own economy.But even now, while there is still lots of human mental work that is still needed, something more important is happening to the economy. More income is produced by the machines, than the humans,. And income produced by the machines, accrues to whoever owns the machines. This means, increasing amount of wealth, flows to human not because of what they do, but because of what they own.This shift from wealth create by doing, to wealth created by owning, is the fundamental shift that is growing inequality in society. Whereas in the past, owning a pair of hands was all that was needed to guarantee the power to create a fair amount of wealth, today, we must own capital, and companies, and land, and technologies, and patents, and computers, and software. It takes money, to make money. If you are not born rich, trying to climb the ladder to owning wealth, is becoming harder and harder as wages from "working with our hands" is steadily dropping. This effect causes economic inequality to grow, and the more it grows, the more self-reinforcing the effect becomes, with inequality growing faster, and worse, day by day.This trend has been with us since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Inequality was very large 100 years ago with the robber barons. But them we fixed that with anti-trust laws, and lots of government social programs and tax systems to take wealth away from the rich, and give it to the poor, in forms of free schools, and roads and other government services as well as welfare.But the trend towards greater inequality only continues to worsen, as we keep adding more technology to the mix. We must shift more wealth from the rich to the poor too keep inequality in check, and keep society stable, and our democracy alive. But the rich are getting fed up with how large the government is growing. It's growing large, because we have used it as a vehicle for funnel wealth from the rich, to the poor. But not just a transfer of cash, but an indirect transfer of goods and services in the form of endless large and complex government programs, from roads, and schools, to public parks, and an excessively huge military complex. We do it indirectly like this, because we have this national obsession that "sharing cash" is "evil". I'm sorry, but it's time for people to wake up, and realize that the true evil, is inequality. If we don't maintain a balance of power in society, our society will fail.It's time to stop trying to share the wealth indirectly through more government programs, and do it directly, by taking cash from the rich, and giving it to poor. And that's what a Basic Income is. It's what we should have started 100 years ago.The idea is NOT to create some basic standard of living for everyone. The size of the basic income transfer is not at all related to how much it costs to live. The size of the payment is a function to how much we feel we must reduce inequality in society.It will be very hard to get people to understand that this is not only Just and Fair, but required. But it is what we must do. The hard part, will be getting it started. But once it's started, then people will learn to accept it as right. Change is always hard for people, and the idea of taking cash from one person, and giving it to another, will be hard for people to accept at first. But accept they must. To make it easy, we can start very small. Maybe only $100 a month of Basic Income for adults, and $50 a month for children and see what happens. What will happen, is that it will set off a great economic growth spurt in society and people will learn to see it as a Human Right.Once they see it has a justified feature of our society, and our economy, they will understand that the correct thing to do, is to raise it as high as possible, creating as much economic equality in society is possible, without hurting economic growth. If we raise it too high, there won't remain enough incentive for people to work, and since for the next few decades at least, we need people to work, that will hurt economic growth instead of helping it. But how high is too high? That we will not know, until we try it. Which is why we should start small, and they grow it, while monitoring the effects. If the economy show signs of stalling due to a lack of motivation, we stop raising it. As long as the economy keeps going strong, keep raising it.When we get to the point that machines are doing most the work, the Basic Income should be very high, creating very high levels of equality across society.