Hamilton City Council backs living wage … Hamilton City Council's lowest-paid staff could receive more than $100 a week after a trailblazing decision to lift workers' minimum pay rates. The council is set to become the first city in the country to adopt a living wage policy guaranteeing its staff an hourly wage of at least $18.40. In a fiercely debated decision the council voted to introduce a minimum living wage for all staff, phased in over two years, and funded from existing budgets, in a move management said would cost at least $170,000 per year. Council democracy staff last night put the final vote at 7-6 but were checking elected members' votes because of earlier confusion over the final voting split. – Stuffco.NZ
Dominant Social Theme: Yes, let government print money and pay for all of us. It's simple, risk free and above all, equitable.
Free-Market Analysis: Because we cover memes, we long ago figured this one out, though admittedly it took some time. But after a while it came clear to us that the globalists were seemingly set on implementing a neo-National Socialist platform around the world if it meant they would be able to maintain their authoritarian grip on money and the governments that print it.
This latest eruption – see above – is part of this promotion, we figure. It comes on the heels of a laudatory editorial in the Washington Post calling for the same kind of nonsense.
Universal Basic Income Promotion Hits the Washington Post
And then there is this:
Eurocrats Contemplate Social Credit as Meme Expands
We are not supposed to notice this dominant social theme spreading throughout the world until suddenly we wake up one day and it is an unstoppable globalist force. At some point, we figure Occupy Wall Street will adopt it, too. Anything that increases the power of the state is preferable to the slow unwinding of central banks due to incompetence and austerity.
And so the campaign continues. It is more than a half-decade long now. A variety of phony books, authors and websites mark its sordid trail and are intended, apparently, to make it appear as if this is an authentic movement rather than the promotion it likely really is.
Afraid of losing their central banking franchise – one that allows them to print money from nothing – those behind the current globalist movement long ago apparently began recreating the agitation and faux-economic solutions that pockmarked the 1930s.
Then as now, the idea was to retain an authoritarian grip on government via populist redistribution.
The patron saints of this nonsense are Silvio Gesell, Major Douglas and, before them, Henry George. Gesell was a particularly noxious type, a Fabian socialist who dragged Henry George and his "land tax" back into the larger debate, even though George lived in an earlier era.
We've read recently that the United Nations wants to create a "living tax" that everyone would have to pay simply for the right to exist. This is analogous to George's idea that if you wanted to own land you would have to pay the state … and no exceptions.
Gesell had his own crackpottery, wanting government to approve everyone's money each month and reduce it by perhaps ten percent in order to encourage people to spend it. Major Douglas of social credit fame called Gesell's ideas a heinous tax. But Douglas had his own idea of distributing a "social" dividend to people every year.
It is Douglas that is seemingly inspiring this living wage ideology. But if one looks deeper, one can see these sorts of ideas permeating the Third Reich as well, as economist Gary North has pointed out.
All of these ideas received a kind of test run in pre-War Germany and are now coming back to haunt modernity. We figure it's no coincidence.
Nothing would be more dangerous, in our view, than giving governments the formal power to redistribute "a living wage" to the entire population. It would be incredibly destructive to what is left of industry in the Western world and it would give those doing the distributing an almost God-like authority.
Government itself would go from powerful and autocratic in the modern age to the very giver of life itself. Those who distributed these funds would walk among as the gods are said to have done so many millennia ago.
This is the plan that is now operative, in our view. It includes the deliberate invalidation of free-market economics and freedom in general. In their place it substitutes yet more dictats, including anti-usury provisions, deliberate monthly taxation of money and redistributive schemes that would make Lenin proud. Central banks are to be owned "publicly" rather than "privately," as if that would make a difference.
We've been mercilessly attacked for the articles we've run on this subject, but we think this malevolent meme is one of the most important currently being promoted. If we are correct, it is the real fallback of globalists who are aware that their central banking franchise is eroding and are desperate for something to put in its place.
LETS programs and the patron saint of alternative currencies Margrit Kennedy are deeply involved with United Nations efforts to promote these ideas. Gesell was a Fabian socialist and both Douglas's ideas and Gesell's found fertile soil in Hitler's Germany.
Don't be fooled. Let money be market based and allow currencies to compete. Don't confiscate people's money monthly or throw people in jail for charging a few points of interest for a loan. Stop proposing and backing these schemes that play directly into the hands of those trying to create world government.
Leave us alone.
