Generation after generation has practised the same social life model around the globe.
The model is uncomplicated: be born, get an education, perhaps take advanced education, get a job, trade, profession, or start a business, get married, raise a family, provide for the family, save for retirement.
The underlying principle of this life model asserts we are responsible for building our own lives, our families, our fortunes.
The model attaches a stigma to those people who can’t or won’t live up to the expectations. Namely, these are people who can’t get a job due to disability, or illness. Or they are among the few who shirk responsibility for their life.
Along the way this capitalist model was seen to have imperfections, indeed brutal outcomes when people lost jobs and businesses through no fault of their own such as war or lengthy economic depressions.
To alleviate these concerns, pensions for retired people, social welfare for those unable to work and temporary employment insurance for those out of work were developed and have worked well
This life model operated within the business cycle where boom times turned into bust and then eventually into boom times.
Some of the most significant changes to the model happened during and after the Great Depression of the 1930s when the entire planet was in deep recession.
Governments tried a policy called priming the pump. The policy injected cash into a moribund economy through programs like the Roosevelt plan where people built dams, national parks and other infrastructure in return for a government wage.
The global plans were pulling the economy out of the hole when war broke out.
After the war, governments took on the responsibility of trying to maintain a strong growing economy. Over the ensuing nine decades governments fine-tuned policies to that end, and had avoided an almost inevitable Great Depression. Historically, the world has a Great Depression every 50 to 60 years.
And then the pandemic came. The disease threatens our social model and economic fortune.
Without the hundreds of billion of dollars all governments on the planet have thrown into the system, the globe would be in the midst of a depression like none we have ever experienced.
All nations are pretty well in the same state of shock and need.
In Canada, the federal government proposes a radical change to the social/financial model with plans for a guaranteed basic income, whether you work or not.
That plan, partially outlined when Parliament prorogued, has fiscal conservatives up in arms.
The idea of receiving an income even though you aren’t working is alien. It seems to break that traditional value of taking responsibility for our own fortunes.
Advocates of the guaranteed income point out that benefits are tremendous. Putting more money in the pockets of the poor will help drive the economy.
The poor won’t buy yachts, second or third houses or invest in stocks. They will spend and keep business going. That is the benefit. That and the redistribution of wealth.
Advocates argue the imbalance of wealth and income owned by a few per cent of the population creates lack of hope and potential political instability. They say we need a Robin Hood effect to restore some equity in wealth and incomes.
On the other side of the coin, people argue: this will create a nation of job shirkers, we can’t afford to fund this plan along with all the other concerns that have arisen — adequate long term care, adequate teacher numbers and pay for front line employees.
The debate has started on one of the most interesting policy proposals of modern times.
Ron Walter can be reached at [email protected]
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
