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Swiss Village Votes for Free Money. Now It Just Needs the Cash (bloomberg.com)
A village in Switzerland has decided to go ahead with an experiment on basic income, with a payout of 2,500 francs ($2,570) per month. The next step is to raise money to finance the plan via crowdfunding. From a report: More than 50 percent of the inhabitants of Rheinau, close to the German border, signed up for the project, according to the organizers website. At least half the 1,300 inhabitants needed to say 'yes,' and the count stood at 692 on Monday. The submitted ballots still have to be checked against government data to ensure eligibility. The decision comes two years after a proposal for a nationwide unconditional state stipend failed to pass in a national vote. Rheinau, on the banks of the river Rhine an hour by train from the banking hub of Zurich, was selected by filmmaker Rebecca Panian for the basic income trial. She says she became fascinated by the notion during the national debate before up the 2016 vote, decided to select a village as a guinea pig, and make a documentary.
Didn't most of the basic income projects fail, and this says the government wouldn't be able to fund it?!
What am I missing here, how is this not just socialism (or communism) being called something else? That money has to come from somewhere, this trial is donation based, but if this was at the national level it would have to be funded by the the workers, which by this account is less than 1/2 of the people. Why would someone paying most of their wages want to it taxed at over 50% to support people not wanting to work?
Wouldnt it be better for them to just start a commune in some remote area, where the cost of living is extremely low, and let each person contribute? If its so easy they should be able to get people to join freely, with some doing all the work, and some people just living off everyone else's hard work. No hard feelings right?
How you can fund this "Utopia" without taking workers income or owning the corporations to milk them, seems impossible.
When countries are increasing the retirement age, you can be many people in their late 50's will want to quit, working sucks.
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If it is funded by outside sources it'll be a love fest since nobody in the village has skin in the game and people just get free money without having to take it from other citizens in the same village.
In none of those was "all the money in just one pot". FFS,in 1929, the US GDP was $100 billion. Of that, only $15 billion was all investments in all markets! $80 billion was personal expenditures; that is, money earned and spent by individuals.
France and Rome, capitalist? You think feudal societies are capitalist?! Do you even know what that word means?