Welfare

In the event insufficient work is available, the Globality will supplement an individual’s work to guarantee income at or above the Standard Income. If an individual is partially disabled, the Globality will supplement wages paid by an employer in proportion to the degree of disability. In either of these cases, education and retraining, relocation, and other support will be provided to the individual to ensure they have the necessary Credential in finance and the skills they may require to get work.

The Standard Income Subsidy should eliminate the need for these “Globality Corps” jobs in nearly all cases, but in large-scale disruptive events (natural disasters, plant closings, war, etc.) additional work may need to be identified, and the individual retrained or relocated to do that work (e.g., possibly including additional military training or deployment). This should not be make-work or busy-work: Even unskilled labor brings great mental-health benefits to those without any work at all, and it furthermore discourages malingering and denies SDAPs one of their favorite tools for cutting benefits to those who need them most: Experiments have shown that even animals and toddlers have a concept of fairness in compensation, and if we do not make welfare recipients work for their income not even the most generous of us will be able to resist the temptation to introduce suffering into their lives by cutting their benefits. A strong desire to punish free-riders is a replism even for neurotypicals and so one of those things that we cannot override by just making a rule about it.

Combined with the removal of the financial burden of children from those who can’t afford to take care of them (the Standard Income would be enough for an individual to live comfortably on, but not enough to raise a child on without inflicting deprivation on that child), it should be expected that all other forms of welfare, including workers compensation, unemployment insurance, child support, housing assistance, food stamps, etc., and the massive bureaucracies that have grown up to support them, will be discontinued. Besides shrinking the size of government and the taxes needed to support it, it will be far easier to prevent fraud and other abuse of the system with this “single payer” design: By requiring that everyone work and that any wage subsidy payments go through public corporations it will be possible for individuals at many levels to detect malfeasance. For example, any shareholder in a Corporation would be aware of any discrepancies between gross revenue, sales tax payments, and overhead.

For this to work, disability classification policies needs to be reworked from our current systems, and this is a job for competition/capitalism. If a worker is 90% disabled an employer should be highly motivated to hire them since they would only have to pay 10% of the normal salary. But if hiring that person was associated with high overhead (e.g., if they had to supply expensive equipment or office space for them, or hire additional people to manage them or compensate for them if their disability resulted not just in slow performance, but in unreliable performance), it would still not be economically viable to hire them. The problem is that our current disability classifications are based around the type of the disability and possibly the specific jobs that the individual was previously trained for, rather than how they would be able to perform if retrained for a position where their disability had less of an impact. As such, the disability classification process should instead involve input of The People in general and corporations in particular. The People should provide for any retraining (as an extension of the provisions of The Code specified in the sections on Education and Health Care), but a system of evaluation and bidding from corporations should be put in place such that the disabled individual can actually be retrained for a job that is matches their remaining abilities and the needs of employers. And if a 90% disabled individual can’t adequately perform in any capital-intensive environment, or is unreliable rather than just slow, grouping them with 10 other 90% disabled individuals in some system like The Mechanical Turk and averaging their output would be one possible solution.

Again, the key result is not only providing for the needs of the individuals and the employers, but more importantly that SDAPs are provided the reassurance they need to understand that the disabled are a functioning part of their ingroup and not just a parasitic burden free-riding on the rest of us.

Next: On Charity