Luke Cassar

June 23, 2021

Idea for a Universal Income Cooperative

Recently I've been reading Rutger Bregman's, "Utopia for Realists" and "Humankind: a Hopeful History", and was excited by the idea of Universal Basic Income and thought it could be the answer to all of humanity's problems: Poverty, Nationalism, Climate Change, Planned Obsolescence, and our lack of collective vision to name a few.

I began to wonder if this was something we had to wait for governments to implement, or if we could set these schemes up ourselves.

Here is how it I think it could work: 
  • Members in a group pledge however much they can into a pool. 
  • The pool is then split evenly to all members of the group as a weekly dividend.
  • New members would only be able to join if there was enough money already pledged for them to be paid a dividend from the start.
  • The group can then decide whether it wants to use excess pledges to accept new members or raise the dividend for all existing members.