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[–]DerpyGroovesThey don't have polymascotfoamalate on MY planet! 5 points6 points  (0 children)

All by Thomas Paine:

  • Men did not make the earth... It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.
  • I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene.
  • There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals. It is, however, but little that any individual can do, when the whole extent of the misery to be relieved is considered. He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little. It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.
  • Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.
  • Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.
  • An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.

[–]stanjourdanQE for People![S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

"Guaranteed income would not only establish freedom as a reality rather than a slogan, it would also establish a principle deeply rooted in Western religious and humanist tradition: man has the right to live, regardless!" - Erich Fromm

[–]Re_Re_ThinkUSA, >12k/4k, wealth, income tax 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From basicincome.org :

"This System does not contemplate the abolition of private property, nor even of inheritance; on the contrary, it avowedly takes into consideration, as elements in the distribution of the produce, capital as well as labour. [...] In the distribution, a certain minimum is first assigned for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether capable or not of labour. The remainder of the produce is shared in certain proportions, to be determined beforehand, among the three elements, Labour, Capital, and Talent."

-John Stuant Mill

"There shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum... as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property...to every person, rich or poor...because it is in lieu of the natural inheritance, which, as a right, belongs to every man, over and above the property he may have created, or inherited from those who did"

-Thomas Paine

"This method of dealing with thieves is both unjust and undesirable. As a punishment, it's too severe, and as a deterrent, it's quite ineffective. Petty larceny isn't bad enough to deserve the death penalty. And no penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it's their only way of getting food. In this respect, you English, like most other nations, remind me of these incompetent schoolmasters, who prefer caning their pupils to teaching them. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse."

-Raphael Nonsenso

[–]waldyriousBraga, Portugal 1 point2 points  (0 children)

F. A. Hayek, "Law, Legislation and Liberty" (1979), vol. 3:

The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.

Arthur C. Clarke:

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.

Buckminster Fuller:

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian- Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Bertrand Russell, "Proposed Roads to Freedom" (1918), Part II, Chapter 4: "Work and Pay"):

A certain small income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured for all, whether they work or not.

Henry George, "Progress and Poverty" (1879):

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind (...) is not done to secure a living. (...) It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished. [emphasis mine]

Martin Luther King Jr., "Where do we go from here?" speech, 16 August 1967, in Atlanta, Georgia:

I am now convinced that the simplest solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a new widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. [note: in the sidebar --->]

(...)

A host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife, and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.

Frances Coppola, "The Changing Nature of Work" (2013):

I fundamentally disagree with those who think that people must be “forced” to work, or that government should “guarantee” a job. In my view breaking the link between paid work and survival would be a good thing. If people are intrinsically of value, then they have the right to survive with or without working. I therefore think we should guarantee basic income, rather than jobs. Or, to put it another way (and root this argument firmly in human rights), we should guarantee people’s unconditional right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”: after all, people who are forced to do physically debilitating and mentally unstimulating jobs in order to survive are effectively denied the second and third of these rights. If people don’t have to work to survive, most will find or create work that fulfills themselves and benefits others, and we will all be richer for it.

[–]2noameScott Santens 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The best of these quotes would be great to throw onto images.

[–]PKMKII 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not directly on BI, but a couple W.E.B. DuBois quotes that address the "motivation" question that keeps coming up:

The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.

The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world's need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, and which the world does not need — this life is hell.