"People say, 'That's not fair. Where's the money going to come from? Who's gonna pay for it?' The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community." -Alan Watts : BasicIncome:
Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a
minimum income. Now you see that absolutely horrifies most people. “Say
all these wastrels, these people who are out of a job because they're
really lazy see... ah giving them money?” Yeah, because otherwise the machines can't work.
They come to a blockage.
This was the situation of the Great Depression when here we were still,
in a material sense, a very rich country, with plenty of fields and
farms and mines and factories...everything going. But suddenly because
of a psychological hang-up, because of a mysterious mumbo-jumbo about
the economy, about the banking, we were all miserable and poor -
starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological
hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real, and that people ought
to suffer in order to get it. But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering.
It is ingenuity. You see we are psychologically back in the 17th
century and technically in the 20th. And here comes the problem.
So what we have to find out how to do is to change the psychological
attitude to money and to wealth and further more to pleasure and further
more to the nature of work. And this is a formidable problem.