Bill Bonner, with whom I agree with on most things, comes out with a KCN: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." Yes, it's St David again, although it turns out he was just quoting St Paul.
Bill goes on to expand on this, to show how the idea of a basic income contradicts ancient wisdom,
It was an old idea, another of the precious insights, condensed and hardened – like diamonds – by time and experience. It takes work to produce food. A society that doesn’t work will soon go hungry. But since it now takes fewer and fewer people to produce the food we eat, many people have come to the conclusion that this gem of wisdom has been rendered obsolete by technology. Maybe we don’t all have to work, after all.
What Bill fails to notice, however, is that ever since mankind moved from a hunter-gatherer existence to an agrarian economy, society has supported a significant proportion of the population who have not worked, but have generally eaten rather better than the workers: the elite. This non-working elite of aristocrats and priests had been going thousands of years by the time St Paul made his pronouncement, so, unless St P was being ironic, he failed to appreciate that his was one rule for the poor, with someone else's rule for the rich. One wonders if St David's rule applied to him as well, or just the brothers.
So there's nothing new in having a proportion of the population being paid "to do nothing". It's just a slightly different stratum of society.
Debate Magazine
