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.

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

Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017

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 Spectrum Of Slavery

This essay claims that all people can be placed on a spectrum, wherein their point on that spectrum reflects how much of a slave they are. The totally enslaved are at the top, whereas the truly free are at the bottom. The exact position of any given person is primarily a matter of how much economic duress they are under.

Economic duress is a legal term, defined in such a way that the ruling class is almost never guilty of it. But, in practice, everyone not born into property ownership is subject to a kind of economic duress. The more extreme forms of it are slavery by another name – the term ‘wage slavery’ is not a complete exaggeration.

“Do this or I kill you” is maximum duress. This is the mainstream conception of slavery, inherited from the American plantation experience. It’s true that being forced to obey orders on pain of death is as extreme as duress can get. Someone at this level is at the very top of the spectrum of slavery.

Unbeknownst to many, slavery in other times and places wasn’t quite as awful thanks to the absence of the chattel aspect. There were often rules limiting the extent to which a slave owner could abuse their slaves (n.b. this is not a defence of slavery but an explication of the degrees of it).

“Do this or you will miss your rent, get kicked out into the street and die” is a high level of duress. Getting kicked out of your apartment is better than being killed, but it’s still a deeply unpleasant and stressful experience. If you have to keep working otherwise you get evicted, you don’t have a strong negotiating position.

Same with “Do this or I’ll replace you with some cheap labour”. The position of the employer in the West of 2023 might not be quite as strong as that of the plantation owner in the American South of 1850, but it’s almost as strong, for supply-side reasons. The Western worker of 2023 knows that he better not ask for raises to match inflation when there are a thousand Third Worlders lined up to replace him.

“Do this or you’ll have to look for another job” is no threat when the economy is humming and there are plenty of good employers willing to pay decent wages. When the economy is doing badly, it’s a significant level of duress. In a good economy looking for a new job is a mere hassle. In a bad economy, it raises the spectre of homelessness.

An actual free person, under no economic duress, can meet their needs for food, shelter and clothing without needing to obey an employer for money. This is the bottom of the spectrum of slavery, and surprisingly few people are here.

The simple rule is that anything improving the negotiating position of the worker decreases the extent of duress they are under, and moves them down the slavery spectrum towards free people.

Note that the more duress the worker is under, the greater the profits. This is why there is never a free market for labour. The ruling class will always try to put the working class under as much duress as possible, because this will suboptimalise the working class’s negotating position and optimalise the employer class’s negotiating position, thereby maximising ruling class profit and control.

If the worker needs the job or they will starve, it’s possible to negotiate them down to a minimum. Similar if they need to feed a family or pay a mortgage. Imagine, by contrast, that the worker wins $10 million in the lottery. Do they still need your job? Maybe not. If someone has $10 million sitting in the bank you can be sure that they only work because they want to.

Increasing the supply of labour weakens the negotiating position of the worker and thereby drives them towards slavery. Likewise, decreasing demand for labour (through e.g. raising interest rates) also drives the worker towards slavery.

Decreasing the supply of labour strengthens the negotiating position of the worker and thereby aids them towards freedom. Likewise, increasing demand for labour (through e.g. raising wages) also drives the worker towards freedom.

A sharp decrease in the supply of labour, such as through the Black Death or World War II, leads to unprecedented prosperity for the remaining workers. Employers are forced to pay a high wage because they have so few options.

Thus it can be seen that the intent of allowing mass immigration is not to create freedom for foreign workers but to deny it to domestic ones. It was to push the workers back down that Western countries opened their borders to cheap labour imports in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The end result, by 2023, is that workers in Western countries can’t own homes – slaves by any other name.

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 essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles from 2021 from Amazon as a Kindle ebook or paperback. Compilations of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019, the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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

The Great Resistance, Fully Realised

The Great Awakening appears to be going very slowly. The control system is very clever, and it knows that there are various ways to keep a population submissive. One of the tried-and-true methods is to work the population so hard that it doesn’t have time to organise an awakening or revolution. So before there can be a Great Awakening, there has to be a Great Resistance.

The Great Resistance has been described as a pushback from workers who want to keep working at home. The Coronavirus lockdowns led to a large number of workers working from home, and most of those workers decided that they preferred that to the daily grind of commuting for hours on top of a full day of work.

Many workers have been confused by their bosses’ demands for them to come back to the office post-Covid. It’s hard to see what, apart from a sadistic need for control, would motivate them to demand their workers commute when it isn’t necessary. This has led to some resentment, and that resentment has led to resistance.

Some have taken the Great Resistance concept further, to the point where it has become a Western version of the Chinese “lying flat movement“. After all, the reasoning goes, if you want to save on your commuting time because it’s wasted, why not save on other forms of wasted time as well? Such as working for a wage that you can never own a home and raise a family on?

There’s potentially much more to it than even that.

The Great Resistance has the potential to become an entirely new social movement towards resisting tyranny. If it can combine the right-wingers concerned about losing free speech and other freedoms, and the left-wingers concerned about unaffordable rents and housing, such a movement could have a major societal impact.

The Great Resistance could be a resistance of many things – not just of our material exploitation but also our spiritual exploitation.

Perhaps the most obvious and immediate cause for the Great Resistance relates to the share of wealth accrued by the bottom 99% of society. At the end of 2023, young and working-class people all over the West are in a state of deep malaise. The chance of owning a home that a family can be raised in seems remote for most of those people.

The first cause, then, is liberating wealth from the top 1%. Housing, especially, must be liberated so that people at an age to start families can afford it. This will involve shifting the entire balance of power back from the hoarders of land to the workers of it. Immigration must be stopped so that employers are forced to pay fair wages to locals.

The workday must be reduced so that Westerners have time for something other than work. Everything that sucks time from people unnecessarily, whether commuting, bullshit jobs, unpaid overtime, being always-on-call etc. must be abolished, by law. If the average worker today has become twice as productive as the average worker in the 1970s, they should see at least half of that benefit.

Resisting corporate propaganda is part of this. If any revolutionary social movement is to be successful, its members have to be ideologically clear. This means that they will have to resist the messaging of the mainstream media, the television in particular. Resist the corporate media’s tireless attempts to insert its advertising into your brain. Consume clean information.

Another part of the Great Resistance must also involve resisting shit food and drugs. Some Clown Worlders have coined the term ‘goyslop’ to describe the low-quality garbage food that pervades Western culture. The high goyslop consumption rates are partially because all the energy and time that would have been used for cooking is stolen by the employer. This must be resisted.

Naturally, this also involves getting fit. It’s not just about resisting slop but also resisting laziness. The Great Resistance will involve resistance training. Physical strength is a tangible sign of one’s refusal to collapse into the dirt. The attempts by the ruling class to drive the rest of us into the ground must be resisted.

Also, if any success is to be had, the members of the revolutionary social movement must resist spiritual lies intended to induce submission. The Great Resistance must continue the work and sacrifice made by those throughout history who have battled spiritual terrorism, in whichever form it has arisen. Death narratives must be rejected, and life narratives must be emphasised.

Fully realising the Great Resistance, then, will go far beyond merely working from home. It will involve a complete rebalancing of the relative powers of workers and capital owners, in both physical and metaphysical spheres. Previous attempts to achieve this rebalance have failed, mostly because working-class leaders were replaced by ruling-class lackeys. It’s time to try from a different angle.

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 would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!

The Anglo-Judaic Empire

Making sense of geopolitics demands that people understand how the world has been arranged over the past 250 years. Many different great powers have come and gone in this time, but the most powerful one remains, namely: the alliance between Anglos and Jews. This the Anglo-Judaic Empire.

The infamous Rothschild family shot to prominence through profiteering off the Napoleonic Wars. Niall Ferguson wrote in The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World that the Rothschilds had single-handedly determined the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars in favour of Britain. The profits realised from this eventuality were colossal.

As a paper from Waikato University has shown (link goes to .pdf), Rothschild financiers played a key role in funding gold exploration in the early days of New Zealand, as they also did in Australia and South Africa. Rothschild finance powered colonial adventures in India as well.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild was the biggest name in these dealings. Mayer Amschel Rothschild instructed his five sons to take up a position in each of the major European nations; Nathan was the son assigned to Britain. Nathan established so much power that he was able to make the claim that he controlled the British Empire. It is in such arrangements that the Anglo-Judaic Empire has its genesis.

Were it not for Rothschild influence, Britain may never have had the power to colonise New Zealand, at least not to the extent that they did. Had the Rothschilds thrown their financial weight behind France in the Napoleonic Wars, then France would have likely been the superpower of the 19th Century, and New Zealand would have likely become French.

A 1929 article from the Otago Daily Times exemplifies the nature of this relationship. The article claims that the Rothschilds were instrumental in securing peace in Europe between the Napoleonic Wars and World War One. Whether true or not, it underlines the extent to which Anglos propagandise in support of their fellow imperialists.

During World War One, the Rothschilds played the major role in securing American support for the Allied war effort. The Balfour Declaration was a promise made by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour to British Zionist Lord Walter Rothschild in 1917, guaranteeing the Jews a “national home” in Palestine, then under the control of the Ottoman Empire. This national homeland, of course, later became known as Israel.

The Balfour Declaration won the support of world Jewry against the German Empire. As a consequence, German Jews stopped supporting the German war effort, leading to the collapse of the German Army in 1918. This withdrawal of support led to the “Dolchstosslegende” that was famous in inter-war Germany.

Such arrangements are at the heart of the Anglo-Judaic Empire. Anglo hard power and Jewish soft power combine to create a monster that now rules over the globe.

The immense toll paid by Britain in World War One led to the Anglo-Judaic Empire replacing the British Empire as the world’s leading power. This new alliance reached its zenith shortly after World War II. Having declared war upon, and then having defeated, their major European rival in Germany, there were no longer any major rivals to Anglo-Judaic control. As a consequence, the societies of the world have become Anglo-Judaised over the last 70 years. Anglo-Judaic values have promulgated.

One of the foremost of those values is near-total godlessness. Anglos and Jews are the two most godless people on Planet Earth. As a result, their pre-eminence has led to a decline in spirituality all around the world. This is most clearly seen in modern psychiatry, which has been warped by Anglos and Jews into a materialist mockery of the supposed “healing of the soul”.

Near-total godlessness is also seen in the near-total absence of belief in reincarnation and karma, and the resulting soulless scrabble for money that characterises life in the Anglo-Judaic Empire’s constituent countries. In the Anglo-Judaic Empire, merit is a question of wealth. No-one cares about learning, wisdom, devotion, rectitude or character. Hence why a multibillionaire is odds-on favourite to win the American Presidential Election next year.

A related value is usury. The Anglo-Judaic Empire has enslaved the world through usury, including their own populations, who can no longer afford houses. In Australia, Canada and New Zealand, younger generations are effectively locked out of housing unless they inherit (see this article for an examination of how bad it is in New Zealand).

Perhaps the most salient Anglo-Judaic value is globalism. The Anglos were the first to build an empire that spanned the entire globe, so for them globalism feels natural. Jews, for their part, love globalism as it provides a blueprint for their long-held goal of destroying all the nations of the world and bringing them under a one world government controlled by world Jewry. The Anglo-Judaic alliance is natural as long as globalism is a major factor.

Today, the workings of the Anglo-Judaic Empire are most visible when it comes to the Empire’s unquestioning support for Israel.

America gifts billions to Israel annually, one of the major reasons why Israel can afford universal healthcare for its citizens, something America cannot (seemingly, at least). This is hard to make sense of if you think of America and Israel as separate countries. It’s easy to understand once you realise that Israel is a frontier outpost of the Anglo-Judaic Empire.

The Project For A New American Century, as part of which mostly Jewish intellectuals convinced the gormless George W Bush to invade Iraq, was the most impactful Anglo-Judaic action this century. That Anglo politicians are still invading countries on mostly Jewish orders shows that the Anglo-Judaic Empire is still the world’s major force as of 2023.

The Anglo-Judaic Empire is also clearly visible through American soft power, especially Hollywood. The Anglo-Jewish alliance uses Hollywood to normalise their cultural values across the world. This is why movies such as Schindler’s List are made into cultural icons.

With the decline of Christianity in the Anglosphere, Anglos no longer see Jews as God’s chosen race. This is the split that will eventually destroy the Anglo-Judaic Empire. Without Christianity, there is no strong reason to care about Israel. Neither is there any reason to see Jews as wise elder brothers in faith.

The future of the Anglo-Judaic Empire seems to have a set course already. Inevitably this empire will attack China before China overtakes it, as could be predicted by anyone aware of Thucydides’s Trap. What happens after then is anyone’s guess.

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 would like to support our work in other ways, subscribe to our SubscribeStar fund, or make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!