{"id":672,"date":"2015-06-16T13:31:40","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T17:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=672"},"modified":"2015-06-16T13:43:57","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T17:43:57","slug":"mini-income-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=672","title":{"rendered":"Mini Income Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ndp<\/a>Thomas Mulcair and his socialist NDP party are ahead in the polls for the upcoming federal election, hot on the heels of the NDP Albertan sweep.\u00a0 Of course, polls are only slightly indicative of the political temper, but they do signify something.<\/p>\n

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What<\/em> this signifies is more than just ‘politics’ or some vague partisan loyalty or dissatisfaction with Stephen Harper.\u00a0 Rather, there is a cultural shift at work, the genesis of which is found in our schools, universities, media and the very mindset of almost everyone whose principles are formed by these entities (which includes just about every Canadian, unless they actively resist such a formation).\u00a0\u00a0 The socialist policies espoused by the NDP, and by all of our political parties to one degree or another, are not just economic.\u00a0 They rather embody a whole different approach to life, work, family, morality, and everything subsumed under the all-embracing term ‘culture’.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Allow me to address just one policy that sums up their view, the notion of a minimum income<\/em>, also known as ‘mincome’.\u00a0 So far, only the NDP in PEI<\/a>, as well as, curiously, the mayors of Calgary and Edmonton<\/a>,\u00a0have publicly espoused this notion, which has been debated for a large part of the previous century, and should be distinguished clearly from minimum wage.\u00a0 A minimum wage guarantees that an employee must receive a certain amount (usually per hour) for work done.\u00a0 But one must first have a job to receive minimum wage.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A minimum income guarantees (again by law) that every <\/em>citizen of a given age will receive a salary from the government of some sort, whether he has a job or not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I do not think that in this brief column I could enumerate the problems with this socialist folly, but we can make a start.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Minimum income was actually tried in Canada as an temporary experiment, in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970’s<\/a>. \u00a0The brief five-year study seemed to show that people continued to work, and that life actually improved under the mincome scheme. \u00a0From a cursory glance, however, corroborated by subsequent analysis, the experiment did not offer the full long-term effects of putting everyone on a basic wage (not least, everyone knew it was temporary, and that they were being studied).\u00a0 For something more real, consider the current welfare system in our modern society, which functions like minimum income.\u00a0 Can one really argue that those on welfare are better off, and that dependency on welfare has produced good effects for society?\u00a0 \u00a0On the contrary, welfare, which was never intended to be permanent, but rather a temporary, emergency measure, has created what John Paul II called in Centesimus Annus<\/em> a permanent and entrenched ‘Welfare State’ , a particularly pernicious drain on a society’s resources.<\/p>\n

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By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. (#48)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The worst harm of this intervention by the State bureaucracy is not economic (which is bad enough), but personal.\u00a0 As the same Pope wrote in his encyclical Laborem Exercens \u00a0<\/em>(On\u00a0Human Labour), we as human beings are perfected and enobled by work.\u00a0 To keep grown men (and, now, women) on permanent fixed incomes for doing nothing leads to a stunting of their development, and an infantilization of the populace.\u00a0 Adults will be turned into permanent wards of the State and its bureaucracy, bored, listless, unfulfilled, watching Netflix and playing Minecraft.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The notion of minimum income is an attempt to put a fig leaf on the growing plague of unemployment and welfare, which is reaching crisis levels here, and more so in many other countries.\u00a0 No longer will there be any ‘welfare’ or ‘unemployment’, for everyone will now be happily employed doing whatever they want to do!\u00a0 Oh joy, oh bliss, as we frolic in pastoral settings waving our government cheques…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But several questions come to mind:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Who is to determine what kind of work is being done, or whether any work is being done at all? Could I receive a minimum income for cycling around the Madawaska Valley, or, ahem, writing a blog? \u00a0If there is<\/em> oversight, presumably this would be by government officials, basically turning every citizen into a slave of the State, not to mention also a burden to the State.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Who furthermore is to pay for the near-unimaginable cost of this endeavour?\u00a0 They talk of taxing those of ‘higher income brackets’, but that will not even nearly cover what this will entail, in a country hundreds of billions of dollars in debt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is also the problem of incentive.\u00a0 Proponents of minimum income ‘reason’ that people will work harder so that they can increase their incomes, but this is, in general, fallacious.\u00a0 Even Emperor Nero realized that the vast majority of people are content with panem et circenses<\/em>, with their bread and circuses, which today we might call the internet, beer, pizza, cheap cigarettes.\u00a0 Why would they work harder?\u00a0 This becomes especially relevant if the harder you work ,the more you will be taxed to support the continued \u00a0growth of the welfare society ‘beneath’ you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"auto<\/a>I stopped in to see my mechanic the other day, to tighten the lugs on my car, and in our brief conversation, he mentioned that his other mechanic quit, and he is having great difficulty finding a replacement.\u00a0 Automechanics, he said, is becoming ever-more difficult as cars get more complex, and very few are going into the field.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I thought, hmm, who would want to work in a hot, sweaty garage, covered in oil and grease, toiling away on the undercarriage of vehicles?\u00a0 Unless, of course, one was nicely paid for doing so.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"pajama<\/a>But, if someone can make a decent, or at least a living, wage making paper airplanes or writing the great Canadian novel while sipping coffee in their jammies at home, or, for the more highly inspired, landing some highly-compensated paper-shuffling government job in an air-conditioned office, the answer seems obvious. \u00a0What would inspire the automechanic to work to pay for all this?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hard work should be highly compensated so that at least some are inspired to go out there into the field to build and maintain what we used to call an ‘economy’.\u00a0 Saint Paul was right that he who does not work should not eat, for without work, there is no society, no culture, really, no nothing.\u00a0 Unless necessity dictates otherwise (i.e., you are a child or incapacitated), we should all pay for our own bread and circuses.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

June 15, 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Mulcair and his socialist NDP party are ahead in the polls for the upcoming federal election, hot on the heels of the NDP Albertan sweep.\u00a0 Of course, polls are only slightly indicative of the political temper, but they do signify something.   What this signifies is more than just ‘politics’ or some vague partisan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,10,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":678,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}