The Alt Centrist Approach To Work And Employment

If politics is about securing the means of a good life, work and employment are how most people primarily achieve this. Both are therefore at the core of the alternative centrist approach.

The average person in our society, not having a spiritual or religious tradition, neither any intellectual or cultural interests, nor any meaningful family connections, imposes order upon their lives primarily through their employment. Prosocial behaviour is taught through the need to cooperate with workmates and submit to the corporate hierarchy. Work gives many people purpose and keeps many bad thoughts away.

The alternative centrist proposal is that the order imposed by the workplace needs to be balanced by an equal proportion of freedom.

The alternative centrist agrees with Julius Evola that spirituality ought to be the primary focus of a life, and a person’s way of earning a living is less important. Productivity is the measure of slaves; happiness is the measure of free people. As such, the alternative centrist state would not indulge in the vulgar GDP obsession that characterises our merchant-ruled age. Although productivity would be important, this would only be as a means to a happy life. The alternative centrist state would constantly emphasise, in contradistinction to a Marxist or capitalist one, the relative unimportance of wealth (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Spirituality).

The problem with work and employment in the West is that we never came to terms with the fact that we now live in an age of abundance. Our economic model was founded in an age when anyone who didn’t labour was likely to become a major burden to their community. The unemployed were mostly left to starve until the advent of unemployment benefits near the beginning of the 20th Century. Now there is so much wealth that there is no need for the workamania of bygone times.

However, the drive of the employer class to pauperise their workers has remained. Hence a battle has ensued, between the representatives of capital and the representatives of labour. Resulting from this battle was a multitude of laws and regulations concerning work and employment. The reasoning is that these laws should provide for a fair balance between the needs of the employer and the needs of the worker, such that the employer gets his profit and the worker gets his means to subsistence.

Unfortunately for the modern Western worker, he has been driven into a state of wage slavery. Even if the job only occupies his body for 40 hours that week, chances are it occupies his mind for many more. Many people go to bed thinking about their work and wake up in a state of dread. Because the alternative is often destitution, homelessness or imprisonment, the worker puts up with his awful conditions.

This situation has come about by design.

The alternative centrist supports a universal basic income (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Welfare). This UBI would be enough for anyone to renounce the world. Thus it would act as a floor on the level of desperation the worker can be subjected to, and finally give him some leverage, for the first time since the advent of neoliberalism and mass immigration.

With a universal basic income, there would be no need for minimum wage laws. So in one stroke, all of the right-wing arguments about inefficiency of minimum wage laws would be accommodated. The right wing likes to argue that they should have the freedom to work for a pitiful wage if they should so choose (e.g. to gain work experience). Under an alternative centrist system with a UBI, you could employ someone for $1 per hour.

There would also be no need for worker protections when it came to security of employment. The concept of “unfair dismissals” relates to a situation where losing one’s job entails a significant disruption to one’s life. A UBI moderates that disruption. Hence an alternative centrist government sees little problem with the “hire and fire” method of employment.

The universal basic income would defeat the argument that agricultural interests need to import cheap labour to do seasonal work. With a UBI, workers would be free to live cheaply in urban areas for most of the year, and then work hard for a season in an agricultural enterprise, before returning to the cities. By this means, the needs of the citizen for income, the employer for labour, and the nation for cohesion can all be met with a maximum of order, freedom and justice.

Anyone who aspires to more than a student’s lifestyle, however, will probably need a job. Unless a person is born into money, a UBI will only pay for the barest essentials. It will cover cheap rent in an undesirable location, basic foods and utilities, some simple clothing and little more. Aristotle noted that desires tend towards the infinite, so there will be plenty of motivation for people to get work and stay employed. Those who argue that a UBI will turn the workforce into couch potatoes don’t understand how unpleasant the student lifestyle is in the long term, and how difficult it is to meet one’s natural social needs without work and employment. The vast majority of people will desire more and they will need to work to get it.

The alternative centrist government would not seek to expand beyond the existing size of Western governments. However, it would maintain a Ministry of Works. This would employ a considerable number of people in national infrastructure projects.

Beyond a Ministry of Works, the alternative centrist government would leave most employment to the free market. The goal would be to facilitate the creation of internationally competitive firms, so as to maximise the nation’s return on the investment in education and infrastructure that made the firms possible in the first place.

Regarding specific jobs, the various schools would seek to link up students to firms in the appropriate industry. In theory, the schools ought to prepare people for whatever employment currently existed in the various realms (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Education). So in the realm of clay, the schools would funnel students towards agricultural, labouring, retail and simple trades. In the realm of iron, towards military, police and security jobs. In the realm of copper, towards more advanced trades, entertainment and the arts. In the realm of silver, towards business and administration jobs. Those in the realm of gold will seldom be employed, other than to learn experience.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

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Where The Millennial Generation Won – And Lost

We oldest Millennials are now in our mid-40s. This affords us enough of a vantage point to look back and see where it went right for our generation, and where it went wrong. Where we won and where we lost.

Economically, our situation was clearly worse than for the Boomers but better than for Gen Z. Looking at the long-term home price to income ratio trend, it can be seen that Boomers enjoyed the best of times when it came to affording the necessities of life. The hardest times are now and the future.

Finding housing is hell for people today, but it wasn’t so bad 20 years ago. At the turn of the Century, when we Millennials were young, housing was plentiful and cheap. Finding good quality student flats was easy. Gen Z have it very hard by contrast. Compared to previous generations, very few of them are married and homeowners by the age of 30. This is the main reason fertility rates are crashing.

The days of the Boomers being able to land a job with a firm handshake are long gone. Millennials, however, have managed to scrape ourselves into a position where most of us are doing okay. For Gen Z the situation is so precarious that mental disorders are surging. The combination of housing uncertainty and precarious employment has made life hellish for the generations after us.

Education has been extremely mixed. On the one hand, the ease of access to higher education is excellent thanks to the Internet in general and YouTube in particular. This has made it possible to receive university-tier lectures without needing to move to a university city.

On the other hand, the education system is now full of Marxists. It’s very difficult to get an education today without also being brainwashed into hating white people. The Long March Through The Institutions has been completed, and now one cannot get into a teaching position without being a Marxist. This has ruined the quality of mainstream education and turned it into propaganda. So that high-quality material, although it can be beamed directly into your house now, is harder to find than in previous eras.

Arguably we Millennials had the best women. Millennial women were post-Christian in the sense they generally didn’t have the same religious hang-ups that Boomer women did. They were up for it – the popular belief was that sex was a fun and positive thing. Millennial women liked having boyfriends. The gender discourse was not yet totally poisoned.

Gen Z seems to have a preponderance of sexually unresponsive women owing to mass antidepressant and antipsychotic uptake. This was only a small problem for Millennials. Gen Z also appears to suffer from a new form of puritanism that suggests sex is immoral. Even approaching a woman is considered offensive by some of these new ascetics. The net result is that love and romance is much less fun for young people today.

Millennials also arguably had the best relation to technology and video games. The Silent Generation had the radio and the cinema. The Boomers had the television. We Millennials got all of that as well as (what seemed like at the time) incredible video games. But we didn’t also suffer the invasive panopticon that Gen Z did.

It was possible for Millennials to party and cut loose without the fear of being recorded that Gen Z currently operates under. We could do dumb stuff without it ending up on the Internet for the whole planet to gape at. Gen Z is imprisoned by technology in a way that we never were; history has truly vindicated Ted Kaczynski.

Entertainment and culture was very good for Millennials. The music may not have been as great as it was for the Boomers, and the literature may have been significantly worse, but the film was as good, and in all cases much better for Millennials than for Gen Z. We mostly had the same drugs as the Boomers, i.e. alcohol and tobacco with the occasional bit of weed. Gen Z has access to a much wider range of recreational drugs and has to deal with much less stigma.

Social cohesion is much worse for Millennials than for Boomers. The Boomers got to grow up in white societies in which politeness and consideration were normal. Their neighbourhoods were mostly safe and full of people who looked out for each other.

The Muttening kicked in for Millennials, who had it much worse than the Boomers. But Gen Z will have it much worse again. Gen Z is growing up in conditions closer to a zoo than to a civilisation. Whether our societies have still avoided collapse by the time Gen Z are pensioners is anyone’s guess. But the early stages of collapse can be seen in white flight from big cities.

When it comes to spirituality, we had it about the same as the Boomers in that we were also pinned by the Clown World Fork of Christianity or atheism. Almost all of us got the mainstream scientific atheist narrative throughout our school years, and many of us came to adulthood watching the Four Horsemen of Atheism, who seemed logical and reasonable. Those of us who suspected there was more to life than materialism usually ended up on psychiatric medication.

Gen Z may live to see a genuine spiritual resurgence, even if we don’t. This is because materialism is no longer satisfying to people in general. There’s now an awareness that materialism correlates with nihilism and thereby with all kinds of degeneracy and misery. This has led to a revival in the perennial spiritual philosophy. Whether this is the much-prophecised dawn of the Age of Aquarius and another Satya Yuga remains to be seen. But the early signs are promising.

The general rule is that Boomers had it the best, Gen Z the worst, and we Millennials somewhere in the middle. This accords with society’s general decline into Clown World. However, Millennials did have it best in some limited ways.

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The Alt Centrist Approach To Taxation

Taxation is symbolic of the imposition of order, and therefore of the Establishment Right. Everywhere there was a king, there was also a taxman. For a political body to operate on a higher level, there have to be taxes, as anyone who doesn’t successfully collectivise gets wiped out by those who do. Thus, the kind of natural selection that operates at the human group level has selected for groups that can successfully levy taxes.

Without taxation, it’s impossible for a political entity to impose the order that it needs to survive at the collective level. Thus the Alternative Centrist has no time for the argument that taxation is theft. This is the narrative of a child who doesn’t want to share its toys. It’s a fundamentally unserious narrative for people who have never thought about things.

Related to this, the Alternative Centrist believes that it’s morally impermissible to tick up a debt today and pass it down to one’s grandchildren. All the bleating about taxation being theft doesn’t mean it’s okay to pass the theft onto one’s descendants. Taxes must be high enough to cover government spending, currently some USD7.1 trillion in the case of America and NZD183 billion in the case of New Zealand.

The Fourth Acceptance of Alternative Centrism emphasises the importance of truth. The truth is that some ways of earning, investing and spending income are more prosocial than others. The Alternative Centrist buys the argument that taxation is a useful tool for modifying behaviour: in fact, it’s almost as good as the law. If some ways of gaining money are borderline criminal, there’s no shame in taxing them hard.

Most people can agree that working a normal job is prosocial. Some jobs are dirty or dangerous and the people doing them are really at the coal face of society. Many jobs are downright depressing, but need to be done. Other jobs are tedious in a manner that is harmful for mental health, but also need to be done. People who do these jobs generally don’t get paid much, so they also ought not to get taxed much.

The usual approach here is a progressive income tax system. The two problems with this are: progressive income tax systems are disorderly (i.e. expensive to administrate) and they tend to hammer the hardest workers.

The Alternative Centrist solves these problems in two ways.

The first is a moderate tax-free threshold, roughly equal to what a person would get on an unemployment benefit (i.e. the minimum one can live on). This is mostly for the sake of order: there is no point in taxing someone to just give the same money back in services that people wouldn’t have needed if taxation hadn’t impoverished them. Most Western countries do this, but it’s pointless and inefficient. Much better to have a tax-free threshold near the amount of money that a person needs to survive.

The second is a flat tax. Flat tax proposals appeal to the Alternative Centrist sense of justice, because they do not penalise hard workers and high achievers. A so-called progressive income tax system penalises working long hours, which is in theory the sort of prosocial activity that ought to be encouraged.

The argument that low taxes (a typically right-wing concern) are pro-freedom (a typically left-wing concern) is rejected as money worshipping. However, the Alternative Centrist approach is to tax labour lightly, on the grounds that it is the most prosocial way to make an income. This is in accordance with the Fifth Acceptance.

The Alternative Centrist approach also suggests that unearned income should be taxed much more than earned income, on the grounds that earning an income is more prosocial than receiving one without earning it.

Unearned income in the form of rent is the most antisocial. The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say observed that “Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery.” The argument that landlords “provide” housing is summarily rejected: it’s like claiming that armed robbers provide health. As the most antisocial legal way to make money, rental income needs to be taxed heavily.

The Georgist solution to rental income is excellent.

Residential and commercial rents in the United States are estimated to bring in USD$2.2 trillion every year. If we assume that the ground rental value of these rents is about a third of that, an 80% tax on those ground rents ought to yield some USD$600 billion p.a.

Existing land tax proposals (c.f. that of New Zealand’s Opportunity Party) often make the error of taxing the family home. The error here is in destroying security of household tenure. If the household is the basis of society, then security of household tenure is the basis of the order of that society. This goes against the First Acceptance. The Alternative Centrist would rather see massive taxes on income from ground rents than taxes on a family home.

Wealth taxes are discouraged by the Alternative Centrist. Unlike land taxes, wealth taxes can be avoided by taking the wealth overseas. Thus they are rejected on the grounds they lead to disorder. Inheritance taxes on family homes are rejected for the same reason: breaking up family homes to pay inheritance taxes is grossly disorderly (inheritance taxes on investment properties would be severe though).

Earning money from investments is still prosocial, but not as much as working. Thus, dividends on stocks and shares would be taxed moderately under an Alternative Centrist system. Capital gains would also be taxed moderately under this logic. To get around the problem of tax havens, the Alternative Centrist approach is to work towards international minimum corporate tax agreements.

Moderate consumption taxes are supported by the Alternative Centrist. Consumption isn’t antisocial, but an excess of it is, and therefore taxes on consumption ought to be moderate. They can also bring in significant amounts of money, lightening the burden on workers. Transaction taxes are also considered good when and if they are workable. The concern is that they can be easily avoided, which is both disorderly and stupid.

Following the reasoning that taxation can guide behaviour, the Alternative Centrist approach to taxation involves heavy vice taxes.

Alcohol taxation brings in USD11 billion for the American federal treasury every year. Texas brings in USD1.6 billion in alcohol taxation annually for a state with around 9% of America’s population, and this revenue is generally considered typical per capita alcohol tax revenue for an American state. Extrapolating that across 50 states, and adding federal revenue, suggests some USD30 billion p.a. is currently gathered through alcohol taxes.

The examples of American states that have already legalised cannabis suggest that every million people can yield USD50 million in annual cannabis taxes. So a population of 350 million could yield over USD17 billion p.a. Taxes on cannabis consumption could bring in NZD490 million p.a. in the case of New Zealand, according to the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research.

Significant gambling wins would also be heavily taxed. There is no need to tax gambling wins below a certain threshold, but professional gamblers would be taxed moderately and those receiving huge windfalls would be taxed heavily.

These vice taxes would not bring in that much money, perhaps 2% of government spending at most. The point of them is primarily to use the tool of taxation as a way of imposing good order upon society; there is more to taxation than just government revenue.

Realistically, even with all of these measures, much of the tax burden will have to fall on workers. Even with AI and mass automation, this is inescapable. On account of the sheer volume of the masses, the bulk of economic activity consists of everyday workers. This will have to be taxed to some extent to keep the national machine running. But, with all the measures outlined above, the tax burden on workers should be minimal.

The general principle is threefold: light taxes on labour, moderate taxes on investment and consumption, heavy taxes on vices and unearned income.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Alt Centrist Approach To Welfare

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle introduced the concepts of corrective and distributive justice. Corrective justice is the form that we’re used to: commit a crime, and you get corrected with punishment. Distributive justice relates to who justly gets how much of the boons of society. Aristotle believed that people ought to get rewards and honours in proportion to their contribution to society. He was emphatically not a communist, believing that those who contributed more ought to get more. But neither was he a capitalist, preaching that the poor deserve suffering. He promoted the Golden Mean between the two extremes.

Ancient Rome is often characterised as a cruel, sink-or-swim system, but they had an institution known as the annona, or the grain dole. After centuries of military expansion, many wealthy landowners had replaced Roman workers with foreign slaves. The resulting impoverishment led to constant rioting and civil unrest. So Gaius Gracchus introduced the grain dole in 123 BCE, resulting in free food for the Roman citizenry. Later emperors added pork and wine.

The concept of distributive justice barely exists in the modern West. In our system, which can be called whorehouse economics, whoever has the money decides. People are conditioned to believe that a person is entitled to what the money men give them, and no more. Anyone who doesn’t work for a capitalist deserves to starve. This is because the merchantry have long since driven the Establishment Right out of effective control, so concepts like noblesse oblige are long forgotten.

This approach is transparently cruel and therefore is rejected under the Fourth Rejection.

The Establishment Left’s argument for welfare is that it maximises freedom. The logic here is that poverty itself is the first and primary source of enslavement. Poverty makes people desperate, which enslaves them to landowners and other wealthy people in the hope of a paycheck. So raising the floor of poverty through welfare promotes freedom generally.

The Establishment Right counters with the observation that if the masses are allowed to vote themselves infinity free money, they will do it, and the economy will collapse. Tiberius is recorded as stating that if everyone would be granted everything they petitioned for, the treasury would soon be empty, and the state would have to extort or steal money to stay operational.

Therefore, distributive justice needs to find the mean between impoverishing the masses and impoverishing the treasury.

The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck was one of the first Establishment Centrists. He championed a welfare state as a way of ensuring peace between the various classes of Prussian society, and to forestall the rise of Communism. His reasoning was that if people who couldn’t work had a safety net to fall back on, society would be much stronger.

Over time, other countries adopted similar systems. As decades passed, and more and more was handed out in exchange for votes, these systems became bloated. Tiberius’s warning applies to society in 2026 as well as to his time.

By today, disability insurance fraud in America is estimated by the FBI to cost USD40 billion per year, and in Australia is believed to cost up to AUD4.6 billion per year. These vast sums require further vast sums to investigate and police. This is one of the fundamental problems with the current approach to welfare: if you only give it to the “deserving”, following the belief that everyone is obliged to work unless disabled, it costs billions to determine who is deserving and who isn’t.

A universal basic income is an elegant solution. It maximises freedom and minimises cruelty (as well as expense).

The alternative centrist doesn’t buy the right-wing argument that everyone needs to “earn” a living. For one thing, that kind of moralising is the exact kind of slave morality that alternative centrism exists to oppose. For another thing, the UBI will not provide a high standard of living. Elon Musk’s idea of a universal high income is not realistic, because so much of wealth is about controlling other people, and that’s a zero-sum affair.

The UBI would be low, not generous, and there would be very little government largesse over and above this. Private charity would still be available, as it is today, but there would be no accommodation allowances, temporary additional support, disability bonuses or any other spending over and above the UBI (one might consider paying a half-UBI to mothers of under-18s for nationalist reasons).

The UBI would lead to all of order, freedom and peace for a variety of reasons.

One is because it would enable forward planning. Even if a UBI recipient only got $500 per week, they would know they were getting $2,000 in the next month and $25,000 in the next year, and could plan accordingly. This would open up opportunities for securing rental tenancies or business financing that did not exist previously.

The second is that it would minimise resentment. As of right now, young Westerners working the average job in their locale cannot afford housing. They watch half of their wages disappear in rent and are left with little after food and transport are paid for. It feels like a bitterly cruel rip-off. A UBI would let younger people also feel like they were getting a share of the bounties of modern society.

The third is less pressure on desirable housing. Most young people, upon finishing their education, find themselves forced to move where the jobs are. This is usually the big cities. The enormous demand for housing in urban areas is the prime driver of the housing affordability crisis. A UBI would make it possible to survive in low-cost, low-opportunity areas. This would release pressure on urban housing and make it more possible for younger people to afford the housing they need to raise families in, even if it meant taking a less ambitious job.

The fourth, and perhaps major reason, is that it would remove the desperation that is often the cause of crime. No-one would wonder where their next dollar was coming from: they’ll get $500 next Wednesday evening. This would promote orderly conduct. It would also make it politically feasible to introduce severe punishments for antisocial behaviour, the reasoning being that, absent desperation, people would only commit crimes out of malice. Therefore it’s justified to bring the hammer down on criminals.

It might be argued that a UBI will lead to degeneracy, as it pays people to do nothing, but that is countered in other ways (see The Alt Centrist Approach To Society).

The alt centrist approach to welfare is simple, neat and long-sighted: a moderate amount of distributive justice plus a high amount of efficiency.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming work of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!