If you support a Basic Income for all people, Birthright Basic Income will even fire you up to do something about it. On the other hand if you are opposed to a Basic Income for all people Birthright Basic Income has something for you to think through. Generally a Good Life includes having a loving family; belonging to a community of like minded people; material success; fulfilling work; healthy body, mind and spirit; good education; and giving and sharing. However the good life actually depends on each of us. For some the good life is just meeting the basic necessities of life like food, shelter and clothing. When we consider a homeless person with old clothes, no shelter and barely enough to eat; a monthly check to cover food, shelter and clothing could automatically lift this person to living the good life with a smile on his face. When another human being smiles it affects us positively and we automatically smile back because we feel good inside. Is it really too much, in the midst of plenty, to put a smile on the faces of our brothers and sisters and make us feel good inside?
You may not agree with giving people a pay check for no work because you probably believe that if a person does not work the person should not eat but if you really think about it that is not what you believe; instead it was something that was forced on you in your moment of helplessness. But the moment you begin to think you will realize and agree with Jim Carrey that “There are certain people in our society that need to be taken care of. There are people without as many opportunities that need to be helped toward those opportunities…….” And if you take helping our fellow creatures to a moral level you will also agree with Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator that “Eliminating poverty is such a moral imperative and something that I believe in so strongly,” “There’s so much research about how bad poverty is. There’s so much research about the emotional and physical toll that it takes on people. "I think about the amount of human potential that is being wasted by people that are not doing what they want to do. I think about how great it would be to undo that. And that's really powerful to me."
Now consider the fact that some of us are sickly, weak, lazy, foolish, mentally challenged and physically challenged and some of us are retired or old and some of us are children or pregnant, while others are clever, shrewd, strong, cunning, deceitful and greedy. In this mix of different conditions, states, abilities and circumstances we cannot compete favorably with each other. For instance how could the sickly, the weak, the lazy, the foolish, the mentally challenged, the old and the physically challenged compete favorably with the shrewd, the clever, the strong, the wise, the cunning, the deceitful and the greedy?
Before and during the pandemic my family and I often cooked food for the homeless and delivered the food directly to them or to the state organization responsible for feeding the homeless. We always felt happier when we delivered the food we cooked directly to the homeless because of the smiles on their faces as they eat the warm food. Don’t you think it is time to begin a Basic Income program to put smiles on the faces of our brothers and sisters? The idea that a fellow creature must suffer before I can be fulfilled has put the world in a limited place for centuries. But now that we have realized the root cause of our suffering we can move forward with a Birthright Basic Income for all people. to put a smile on our faces!