The Maths On The UBI Argument

This week’s release of the Sora text-to-video engine has reignited a recent debate. It seems to most well-informed observers that artifical intelligence is going to make a large number of occupations obsolete in a short number of years. This has got people talking about a universal basic income again. So VJM Publishing does the maths.

Let’s say our putative UBI is $385 per week, across 52 weeks, making it just over $20,000 per year. $20,000 times 4 million eligible Kiwis equals $80 billion per year. Where to find that?

There’s one really obvious source of finding half of that money: the existing benefit system. According to budget.govt.nz, existing benefit expenses are some $40 billion per year. A UBI would mean that there was no longer any need to maintain the existing welfare system.

This would also mean that WINZ itself could be completely scrapped. The welfare bureaucracy would no longer have any reason to exist once a UBI was in place. That would save another $3 billion (also as per budget.govt.nz above).

Many will be astonished to hear that WINZ spends about three billion a year just administering benefits. But that is the price of not having a universal income. With no universal income, welfare benefits have to be gatekept to the “truly worthy”. This means at least one WINZ office, usually with dozens of staff, in every major built-up area in the country, to deter the supposed hordes of bludgers.

That’s $43 billion of the $80 billion.

A second area of savings comes from church tax. Although figures for New Zealand are unclear, it’s estimated that Australia is missing out on some AUD10,000,000,000 per annum from not having church taxes. Given that Australia is over five times larger than New Zealand, that suggests that we could bring in at least $2 billion from a church tax.

The only reason why churches are already untaxed in Australia and New Zealand is thanks to an antiquated pre-colonial British law written under the then-common delusion that the Christian religion adds value to society. Now that Christians are a minority in New Zealand, and in the wake of mass Christian opposition to the cannabis referendum, it’s neither necessary nor possible to continue with this delusion.

A $2 billion annual church tax would bring us to $45 billion.

A third area of savings comes from a Georgist-style tax on ground rents. The New Zealand Property Investor’s Federation believes that the total size of the “rental economy” is about $15 billion. That’s fifteen billion dollars earned through sheer extortion, a parasitic form of income-gathering that causes innumerable harms to wider society – and which is otherwise untaxed.

A Georgist-style 80% tax on ground rents would therefore bring in some $12 billion. Perhaps this can be adjusted down to $10 billion on the basis that some of the rental economy consists not only of simple ground rents, but also rent on improvements, which remains untouched by a land tax under Georgist philosophy.

That brings us to $55 billion.

Empty or otherwise landbanked properties comprise a fourth area of savings. According to the Empty Houses Report, there are some 95,000 empty homes in New Zealand. Some of these are being kept empty because of landbanking, some as holiday homes, some as second homes, some as vacant rentals. In any case, if the ground rents of these empty homes were, on average, $500 per week, and if these ground rents were taxed at 80% as per the Georgist principles above, that would bring in another $2 billion, taking our total to $57 billion.

Note that these land taxes entirely avoid taxes on family homes.

New Zealand is one of the only countries in the OECD to not have a capital gains tax, which is a fifth area of savings. The overall effect of this is to stratify society, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. The reasons for New Zealand not already having a capital gains tax are complicated, but they can be summarised as greed making the country a worse place to live.

According to the Tax Working Group, a capital gains tax in New Zealand would bring in some $6 billion per annum ten years after introduction. The vast majority of this money would otherwise be getting hoarded by the people who need it the least. Thus, with a capital gains tax we have accounted for $63 billion of the necessary $80 billion.

Then the rest of the cost of an UBI will be naturally clawed back by the tax system. If the median wage in New Zealand is $31.61 an hour, and if the average worker works 1,369 hours per annum, then the average already-employed person is bringing in some $43,274 per annum already.

Someone receiving $43,274 will pay $6,073 in PAYE, but someone receiving $63,274 will pay $12,002, almost $6,000 per annum more. So if a $20,000 UBI would raise the average worker’s income to $63,274, roughly $6,000 of that would immediately be taxed back. Multiply this by four million workers and you have an extra $24 billion in PAYE.

That would actually take us over the $80 billion by some margin, to $87 billion or so. For maximum efficiency, we might like to introduce a $20,000 tax-free threshold at this point – the logic being that if it costs $20,000 per annum to survive, taxing anyone making less than this is pointless, because it will have to come back to them in the form of government services anyway.

This would cost slightly over $10 billion, i.e. roughly $2,500 in foregone PAYE for each of the four million employed people.

The remaining shortfall can be accounted for by GST intake on increased spending. If the average person spends $5,000 extra per annum on account of their UBI, then some $750 of that will be recouped by the Government in the form of GST. Multiplied by four million workers makes for an extra $3 billion.

In summary, a $90 billion demand for a UBI plus a $20,000 tax-free threshold can be met by scrapping WINZ and the entire welfare system ($43 billion), a church tax ($2 billion), a land tax on the ground rents of rental property ($10 billion), a land tax on empty homes ($2 billion), a capital gains tax ($6 billion), naturally increased PAYE ($24 billion) and naturally increased GST ($3 billion). The numbers for a UBI in New Zealand add up.

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What Lee Kwan Yew Might Have Said To Bronze Age Pervert (And To Us)

A recent tweet from Bronze Age Pervert has caused a shitstorm on Twitter. BAP wrote that “Only a myth of race blindness is workable.” The accompanying tweet thread (highly recommended reading) contains much controversy.

The logic that Bronze Age Pervert is describing is the logic that has ruled the West since World War II. It’s very close to the idea of Plato’s Noble Lie, in the sense that many understand it to be false, but it’s supported anyway for moral reasons (BAP states that supporting it is not his own preference but that avoiding this is politically impossible).

This logic claims that social harmony in the West depends on everyone believing in the myth that all races are equal. If certain races are told that their adverse collective outcomes are the result of their inferiority, they will get angry and destructive. It’s a matter of survival, therefore, that human biodiversity is denied, even as a concept.

If denying racial differences is the Anglo-Judaic approach post World War Two, Lee Kwan Yew supported a different approach.

Lee Kwan Yew was perhaps the most famous proponent of the race realist position. Being Chinese, he mostly managed to avoid accusations of being a Nazi. Lee was happy to state that different races had different average intellectual potentials, and that these different potentials were the reason for their different economic and academic outcomes.

Not only was Lee happy to state this, he was unrepentant. He had very good reason to be so.

Lee Kwan Yew pointed out, quite reasonably, that there were many great pitfalls to the race blindness approach. First and foremost, if we assume that all races are equal, then it logically follows that the lower economic and academic achievement of the less successful races is due to racist discrimination.

If a recipe for inter-racial resentment could be written, it would consist of claiming that wealth gaps cannot be explained by natural wealth-creating aptitude, and that they must be explained by structural discrimination, and that anyone who denies this is a racist. As Ibram X. Kendi’s writing reveals, raceblindness axiomatically assumes that if you aren’t raceblind, you’re a racist bigot.

Lee also pointed out, correctly, that if racist discrimination is widely believed to be the reason for the underperformance of certain races, then demands for quotas and affirmative action would inevitably follow. And then if those quotas and affirmative action programs did not result in equal outcomes, more demands for more of them would come.

The end result of “race blindness” is a never-ending cycle of increasing demands of equal treatment.

The resentment caused by this cycle is, as Lee realised, a major threat to social cohesion. When you have a large proportion of the population believing that the rest of the population has stolen something from them, social cohesion disintegrates. But this is the inevitable result of pushing the race blindness myth.

In the New Zealand mainstream media, one often sees articles decrying a supposed Pacific pay gap. The New Zealand Human Rights Commission’s “Pacific Pay Gap Inquiry” is ostensibly intended to discover the reasons for the fact that Pacific Islanders get paid less than white and Asian people. In reality, the reason for the inquiry is to fearmonger about white supremacism.

The reason for the Pacific pay gap is the same reason as for the working-class vs. middle-class pay gap: intelligence. It’s known that the average Pacific Islander IQ is considerably lower than the average white/North Asian IQ (see: Samoa 88, Tonga 86, Fiji 85). This is as predicted by Cold Winters Theory. So the pay gap simply reflects the gap in cognitive resources bestowed by Nature. It has nothing to do with discrimination.

The narrative that the pay gap necessarily implies structural discrimination, and that anyone who disagrees is a Nazi who sees others as racially inferior, is a narrative of pure resentment. It’s a slave mentality, designed to rabble-rouse and to destroy.

As Lee was aware, racial equality narratives are often pushed by Communists in particular, who push any and all anti-nationalist narratives. This is one of the reasons why he had to oppose them so hard. He knew that if a Communist narrative of Malays getting exploited by Chinese took hold, Singaporean society was liable to disintegrate.

If Lee Kwan Yew could give advice to those of us in the modern West, he would likely tell us to abandon the myth of racial equality. Promulgating it might make certain white people feel morally superior, and it might placate the egos of browns and blacks, but it creates a massive resentment that itself leads to an explosive social tension. He might argue that the “every man for himself” nihilism of the modern West was an inevitable consequence of this resentment.

Finally – and Lee made this same argument many times – races do not have to be intellectually equal for individuals from those races to be equally worthy of respect. There is no reason to disrespect an individual just because his race might have a lower IQ, not any more than there is to disrespect someone because his family is lower class. To do so is vulgar, a sign of low frequency.

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VJMP Predicts 2024

Predicting 2023 at the end of 2022 was fun (you can see how well we did here), so now, at the end of 2023, we will predict 2024.

We predict with great confidence that the general economic position of the average Western worker will continue to decline. This will probably be the major story of 2024 in hindsight. Already Canada, Australia and New Zealand are facing housing crises of unprecedented severity, and record immigration intakes on top of that.

In many places in the Anglosphere, the average worker went backwards in 2023, as 2%+ immigration plus 6%+ inflation minus 3% wage growth (if you’re lucky) means a 5% decrease in per capita income. We predict something similar for 2024 (perhaps with less inflation), i.e. the living standards of the average Anglo to decline by about 5%.

The housing crises in the Anglosphere will lead to the formation of genuine alternative political movements. Already some two-thirds of Canadians have given up on ever owning a home. Until recently, angry sentiments were contained by a belief that the difficulty of buying a first home would eventually return to 1990s levels. That belief is disintegrating, and we predict that this will lead to the appearance of a true alternative to globohomo.

As with previous years, dissent will be kept low by deplatforming anyone who speaks out about the ruling class (we can predict that we won’t be unshadowbanned from Google or FaceBook any time soon). However, in private, people will be seething. Anger at Boomers, in particular, will reach record heights.

We can comfortably predict more cracking down on nationalists in the West, under a variety of pretexts. The firebombing of Tim Lutze’s car on Christmas Eve 2023 presages what’s to come. Anyone dissenting against the globalist narrative will face social and legal pressure and even extra-judicial violence to shut them up. This pressure and violence will become better organised and better funded as time passes.

The quality of popular culture will also decline. The music of 2024 will be best represented by Lizzo. Popular films will mostly be remakes, sequels and adaptations of existing intellectual property. Book readers will become more and more occultist and detached from the wider screen culture. Book reading itself will become a counter-cultural activity.

We will continue to see the alternative media supplant the mainstream. This will be truer of podcasting than of anywhere else. This is where VJM Publishing will be putting much of our effort in 2024. Podcasts will continue to supplant television, especially among younger viewers. The Establishment will keep trying to ban podcasts to protect the mainstream media narratives.

Wars could intensify. We don’t expect China to go for Taiwan yet. But further naval buildup in the South China Sea is all but guaranteed, especially if China doesn’t get their way in the Taiwanese election on January. The alarming rate of Chinese naval production means that they will soon be able to swamp the South China Sea with naval assets.

If Russia defeats Ukraine on the battlefield, which is starting to look likely on account of Ukraine’s resource exhaustion, European countries might make massive investments into the war effort, motivated by the belief that Russia intends to attack further West. While we don’t predict that Russia will go into Poland, an arms buildup in Europe seems very likely.

Gender relations in the West will continue to become more hypergamous. As a result of this, and the economy, more men than ever will drop out of society. Male workplace participation rates will hit all-time lows in Western countries. The “No pussy, no work” phenomenon will become mainstream, even if people aren’t aware of the slogan.

In America, it’s easy to predict the return to power of Donald Trump. The American presidential election will be the high tension point of 2024. If Trump wins, expect widespread rioting from Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, who will be primed to chimp out. Trump may very well get taken out by legal challenges before then.

If the election is disputed to any major extent, we could see the lines of a new American Civil War start to form.

In Europe, it seems like the shift towards nationalism will continue. The Alternativ fuer Deutschland might get banned. If it does, Sahra Wagenknecht’s left-wing nationalist movement will fill much of the gap. This will not solve the problem from the Establishment’s point of view. In fact, the Buendnis Sahra Wagenknecht might have an even higher ceiling than the AfD.

In New Zealand, Chris Luxon and the Sixth National Government will plunge to record approval lows, as the New Zealand electorate slowly awakens from its delusion that Jacinda Ardern was responsible for the world economy going down the toilet. Luxon will spend the whole year selling bits of New Zealand off to his mates. Anyone who complains will be dismissed as ‘envious’.

In summary, things are set to get broadly worse, but there are still plenty of opportunities to succeed for those with the right grit.

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Five Aspects Of Masculinity

People are deeply confused today about what masculinity is. There are many differing thoughts, depending on the emotional maturity of the person thinking. Looking at masculinity from an alchemical point of view, there are five different aspects to be considered, corresponding to the top five steps of the Mithraic Ladder.

For young boys and emotionally retarded men, masculinity is about physical force, especially violence. The spiritually stunted tend to think of everything in terms of who could beat up who. These men represent the element of iron, at the third step of the Mithraic Ladder.

In pre-civilisational societies, or in societies of feral humans (such as criminal gangs), the dominance hierarchy is all about ferocity and physical strength. This sort of behaviour is masculine in a sense, but that’s only one very limited aspect of masculinity.

A higher kind of man grows out of the violence and learns how to make love. He represents the element of copper, which is the first of the precious metals on the Mithraic Ladder. Having realised, consciously or otherwise, that the point of fighting is to win women, the man of copper simplifies the procedure and simply works on making himself attractive to women.

Men who can readily attract women look down on brawlers as meatheads. If the meatheads take each other out, then the more women for the rest of us. In at least one major sense, men like this are far more masculine than the men of iron: they can attract women with less opposition.

A still higher kind of man grows out of cooming and learns social influence. The fifth step of the Mithraic Ladder is represented by silver, which is brilliant in comparison to the lowest four steps. This brilliance leads the man of silver to see a bigger picture, one that goes beyond mere dominance and pleasure to the creation of political structures.

Men at this level also look down on the brawler as a meathead, but on top of that they see the manwhore as a pointless coomer. The reasoning is that a man only needs one woman to have a family and children, so interacting with women beyond that is pointless unless one is seeking social influence.

A yet still higher kind of man judges his fellows on intelligence. Fighting, lovemaking and politics might entertain the gods to some extent, but they’re ultimately all mundane pleasures. Some rarer pleasures are only open to a few, no matter how hard they work. One of those pleasures is achieving a deep and accurate insight into the workings of Nature.

For men at this level, the level of mercury, mainstream interests no longer suffice. The aspect of mercury judges men on how far they have seen into the nature of reality. Fighting and lovemaking might be fun but they’re really for lower animals. Even gaining political power is barely respectworthy. The creative man, the one who can summon divine inspiration and transmute it into worldly forms, is higher than all of those.

The highest kind of man is spiritual. Men at this level are all but invisible to those who have not seen beyond. Despite this, their influence is the most powerful. These men of gold complete the divine calling begun by the men of mercury. The spiritual man has transcended the need to control the material world. Only the higher pleasures are still desired.

At the top level of the Mithraic Ladder, not even seeing beyond is enough. One must have fully integrated those visions, such that one’s own being radiates the divine. This is a conception of masculinity enormously far removed from the warrior at the level of iron. If the warrior imposes order upon the physical, the philosopher imposes order upon the metaphysical.

Complicating this admittedly one-dimensional view of masculinity are the great many bullshitters and bluffers. Because spiritual achievement is not something that can readily be measured, false gurus abound. The sour grapes of failing to assert oneself physically or sexually drives many a man to claim a spiritual acumen he doesn’t truly possess.

It must be emphasised that a man of true power is capable of representing all five of these aspects simultaneously, as per the needs of the situation. Plato may have been a superb philosopher, but he was also a superb wrestler. The completely masculine man is not limited to the level of gold, much less any other one of these five aspects.

These five conceptions of masculinity encompass the spectrum from most material to most spiritual. When times are tough, the men of iron will come to the fore. But when peace reigns, the men of gold start to shine through. The higher the proportion of men of gold in a society, the closer it is to divinity.

These five aspects of masculinity also correspond closely to Plato’s five stages of political decline, as described in Republic. Men of gold correspond to aristocracy, men of mercury to timocracy, men of silver to oligarchy, men of copper to democracy and men of iron to tyranny. Thus, the quality of any political system is primarily a reflection of the quality of the men who comprise it.

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