Universal Basic Income—The Unfinished Business of the Feminist and Labor Movements

What do a housewife in Chicago and a factory worker in Detroit have in common?

No one wants to pay you for your labor.

You read that correctly—your work has no economic value. Society needs you to work, or civilization will fall, but we're not gonna pay you on our dime. Various politicians might give lip service to the importance of the family or the right for workers to earn a living wage, but in the plain truth is, for most of history, caregivers and laborers have been viewed as nothing but slaves. That we even paid a living wage to our labor class from the early 1940’s till the early 1990’s is a miracle, and a first in modern society.

It might seem harsh to call our caregivers and laborers slaves, especially since the Feminist and Labor Movements of the early 20^th century did so much to change that outlook, but the truth still remains. For even though Feminists would like to deny it, raising children takes time and attention which means an employer’s and children’s needs are often at odds. And even though the stock market hates it, the men and women doing the most labor-intensive work in our society actually need to eat and sleep under a roof at night.

While Feminism made strides in opening doors for women to get their slice of the economic pie, they have yet to solve the problem that children need to be raised and that work of caregiving deserves a living wage. And while Unions popped up all over the land fighting for justice for those who work the factory line, build our roads, extract and mine our minerals, put out of fires and protect us from harm, they’ve lost ground in the past twenty years, no longer able to extract living wages, retirement, safe work conditions and other benefits from employers, and instead leaving those who do the most dangerous work in our world behind in poverty.

I think about this a lot and how a Universal Basic Income might finally grant ALL those who work the freedom to choose their masters. I’ve written about UBI from a feminist perspective, a technological perspective, as well as an economic perspective. I’ve even suggested that money isn’t even real, at least not the way you think. My study of wages, money and reward has led me to the unseemly fact that all civilizations, including the one we now find ourselves living in, were founded on unpaid labor both within the home as well as the most labor-intensive part of the economic pipeline—those jobs that need the most physical effort.

Consider this, the first law on the books against slavery was made in 1777 CE, when the state of Vermont outlawed it. The first nation to outlaw slavery was England, in 1807 CE.  Slavery is one of the cornerstones of human society and there’s evidence that it existed long before writing. Most experts agree that the concept of owning another person only became affordable with the advent of towns and cities, where surplus food from the countryside was stored, which may have started as far back as 10,000 B.C.E. Thus for at least 12,000 years, the idea of owning a human was completely acceptable. Slavery is even older than currency, and while we no longer allow slavery in most of the first and second world economies, our monetary systems were based on a significant portion of the work being free. Owned humans provided labor in two key areas: the raising of children and household maintenance (mostly women) and the extraction of raw materials for the creation of goods, and the building of infrastructure (mostly males).

In the female realm, marriage contracts provided this free labor. Women were sold by their fathers to potential husbands (the exchange of a dowry), and then mated to produce and raise children. In addition to birthing and raising children, wives also took care of the home, the elders, prepared food and provided free labor for the social structures needed within the community. In exchange, they were given food and a home.

Of course, there was sometimes romance and love in this situation, but monetary policy cares nothing about love. The economic conditions of the marriage arrangement at its most basic is one in which the husband provided food and shelter for a mate who provided children and the labor of the home. Women in most societies didn’t chose who their husband would be, their family did. And within that economic system the labor of the home was unpaid, and still is to this day. As wealthier classes came into existence, wives of rich merchants or nobles for example, were able to purchase slaves, usually women, to help them run the household. This would free the women of the upper-class to educate themselves and eventually they would be the ones to see the economic inequality within marriage, and begin to fight for the liberation of women, starting with women of privilege.

Yet to this day, women of means need lower-class women to do the work of the home so that they can “lean into” the workplace and make their fortune, and too often, the lower-class women that make it possible for some of our sisters to break the glass ceiling struggle to make ends meet. Since the liberation of women into the workplace, and all of the property, fertility and divorce rights that went with it, the work of the home is at best a minimum wage job with no unemployment, retirement or health benefits, whether providing care for the children, or cleaning the house. And for those women who chose to do this work themselves, the wage is zero.

In the male realm, slaves were used to do the hard work of extraction, whether in the mines or in the fields, or building infrastructure, such as roads, monuments and aqueducts. Men were sometimes born into slavery, but more likely taken by war into slavery. Slaves were the great prize in any battle. Their unpaid labor is what fueled our economies for centuries upon centuries. The Sumerians, Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Mongols, Europeans, you name it, all of those empires were founded on the unpaid labor of male slaves. Their back-breaking work was the origin for all goods, and still is. We can’t have computers without the mines, and someone has to extract the minerals. Google Lithium Mine Workers and enjoy the story of the tech industry's slave labor.

We’ve made strides to use technology to advance this aspect of labor, yet until the 1800’s, the business plans for all enterprises had at their foundation slavery—the extraction of everything from bananas to chocolate, to sugar to gold was done by unpaid slaves. Hence, the most grueling aspects of business were done for free. The only obligation the slave owner had was to house and feed their slaves, to the extent that they wanted productivity from their purchase. Hungry men can’t crawl on their bellies all day in the coal mine tunnels. Men without shelter won’t live very long. Thus, the labor wasn’t exactly free, just like the women doing the work of the home, the men doing the work of the fields needed food and shelter, and their owners provided it.

It is within this structure of unpaid labor that currency was born. And in many ways, we’re still operating in the same way, for even though we’ve come to accept, in part, that humans can’t be owned, that we should be compensated for our labor, and have a choice as to where we invest our labor, our monetary system still trends towards free and unpaid labor as the foundation of its success. Wages and benefits are the largest portion of any profit and loss statement. Reducing those costs is the easiest way to raise profits.

We have the understanding that all men and women are equal under God, but have yet to create an economy where all labor is paid. It’s the economic need for slaves that made the early Greek philosophy of the rights of the individual dangerous. This is why they gave Socrates a cup of poison hemlock, at some level they knew where “know thyself” was going. For once the individual human is glorified, then the issue becomes which humans are to be free? Citizens? Slaves? Women? What do you do when the rights of the individual are in direct conflict with the economy in which you live?

When America outlawed slavery, it fell to the employer to make sure the laborer was paid enough to provide his own food and shelter. Emancipated slaves lost the protection of their masters but gained the freedom to choose who they would work for. The transition wasn’t pretty, and many people were taken advantage of in the early Industrial Age. Enter the Labor Movement. And we’ve been struggling to make the balance sheet work ever since. The end of slavery flooded the paid labor market with freed slaves. Later the Feminist movement would add educated women to the labor pool, and now labor is cheap. So cheap it can no longer pay for food and shelter. In the end, supply and demand will always have its way.

This is why the Labor Movement worked so hard to make sure that the profits created by the work of human hands be distributed to the workers themselves. Yet today, many working-class men and women find themselves unemployed, with no one ensuring they have food and shelter. People who broke their backs, some literally, to give us the world we live in, are ignored, unseen. The economic system might have bent for a while to ensure the dignity for those who labor, but as soon as it could ship the jobs overseas where slavery still exists (China, Burma, Taiwan), businesses did just that, and our government looked the other way. It’s only a matter of time before those slaves are replaced by machines. Consider Foxconn, the maker of iPhones. In 2010, their workers began committing suicide. The answer? Better wages, or working conditions? No, the solution was robots to replace at least 60,000 of them in 2016. Even the low-paid Chinese worker with no union rights is too expensive. Better to replace them with machines.

What then to do with our unemployed laborers? What to do for the caregivers that earn less than a living wage? How do we create a world where their work matters? The work of extraction and building must continue, even with machines at our sides. And the work of caring for children and our elders is important work. Often laborers and caregivers are the heart and soul of their communities. Do we let them go hungry, so that the coders and financiers of the world can make millions and break glass ceilings?

I find it strange that we’d rather pay a low-income woman money for sub-par childcare, but not pay her money to raise her children herself. We’d rather subsidize an out of work laborer with food stamps, than pay him a living wage to fix up houses in his neighborhood, clean up rivers and lakes polluted by industry, or use his body to protect his people and then reward him for it (just think of how we treat our veterans). Universal Basic Income, especially when combined with Social Credit projects such as the one Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang  proposes, can take the ideal that all of us are free one step further. This is the unfinished business of the great worker and women’s movements of the 20^th century. Universal Basic Income is the completion of the promise to the caregivers and the laborers of our nation. It’s the only way to create an economy that is no longer at odds with human rights, and instead works FOR the people, rather than against it.

Blockchains Instead of Beggars: Could Cryptocurrencies Unleash Universal Basic Income?

Cryptocurrencies are America’s latest capitalist playthings—from Bitcoin’s Christmas surprise of over $14K per coin, to the Bitcoin Cash fork of August 2017 and BitFury’s success in negotiating blockchain contracts in both Georgia and Dubai, cryptocurrencies, and the technology that powers them, went from being anarchists’ obscure hobby to the latest shiny object that the financial markets are drooling over. While cryptocurrencies are still a ways off from becoming actual currencies that can be used to exchange goods, they have proven to be valuable assets in today’s markets. Moreover, the blockchain technology that underpins said currencies has begun to gain momentum as an advanced application for the encryption and storage of data. Many see it as the natural evolution in the digital age. 

For those of you who don’t know what blockchain technology is read here, or if you’re interested in cryptocurrencies in general, read here. People much savvier than I can teach you the technical details. Today I want to discuss practical implementations.

In the past two years, cryptocurrencies have made a lot of young people, and already rich old people, very rich. Cryptocoins and blockchain applications are the latest innovation to encourage the American rags-to-riches mythos, and I don’t see their bubbles popping anytime soon. Yet is seems like all of this is creating just another set of 1% who are wealthy, while most miss the boat completely, and this is the complete opposite of what many of the early adopters had envisioned—rather than creating a new cryptoclass, the blockchain was supposed to emancipate humanity.

This has me thinking...how could blockchain technology be used to create currencies that support a universal income? I’ve written before about universal basic income, from both a practical perspective and a feminist perspective. Most people argue there isn’t enough money out there to create a sustainable world where everyone is fed. I’ve long called bullshit on this. Technologically we can now feed the world, so what’s holding us back? The food can be farmed in labs and it can be distributed to the most remote locations on Earth. Why then, does much of it rot in holding areas? Or never even get planted, while children die of starvation in our streets? Even in America, child poverty is rising with 30.4 million children daily in our country using the National School Lunch Program in their schools.

To me, the growing poverty in the “Land of Opportunity” is a universal lack of love on every citizen’s part, not a money problem. However, if everyone’s convinced that there aren’t enough American dollars to go around so that we can guarantee housing, food and clothing to our fellow brothers and sisters, then perhaps it’s time to make more money, and not the kind you can hold in your wallet.

The way to create a new economy based on care and commonwealth may be to create a new currency with community as its only goal, rather than profit and greed, and what better way to do this than with a cryptocurrency? Why not build a crypto-token that is secure, hard to hack and trackable, whose purpose was to provide liquid resources to the most vulnerable members of society?

This last feature - traceability - is very important.  In principle it would be a clear advantage over fiat currency welfare systems, since the cash economy is only partially measurable in terms of mapping demographic groups to purchase/usage patterns. For fun, let’s call the new currency, LifeCoin, created not to get a bunch of miners and traders rich, but instead to be shared from person to person, growing as we all grow in wealth, a true peer-to-peer network both technically and socially. 

A currency whose aim is to provide a universal basic income would need to have the following properties:

1)      It would need to be easily distributed to all citizens in the network 18 and over. Thus, a wallet that accepted LifeCoin, identifiable by the currency platform would need to be created.

2)      It would need to be accepted by all businesses that provide shelter (banks, landlords, etc.), food, clothing and healthcare. Thus a networked payment system that accepted LifeCoin and linked up to user’s wallets would need to be created. It needs to be seamless and provide incentives to services providers for honoring the LifeCoins as currency, thus the traditional fee structures in place for money exchange would need adjustment.

3)      It would need the ability to be changed into other currencies at the owner’s discretion. Thus the LifeCoin would need to be accepted on a decent number of exchanges.

This is a minimum list of technological needs, but at its most basic, a currency needs to be able to flow throughout the society if it’s going to be a true universal basic income solution.

Essentially there are two ways the LifeCoin could be created, either by the government, or by us, the citizens in an act of goodwill.

How could a government create and issue LifeCoin responsibly? There are probably many answers to this, but I think LifeCoin could be implemented by local governments that are looking to use blockchain technologies to manage and secure their data. Governments collect more than taxes, they’ve long been keeping track of our data, such as births, deaths, marriages, land titles, county employee information, driver’s license information, school information, health information and even voting registration and ballots. All of this information needs to be managed, and many governments are starting to consider using blockchain technology to do just that. Take the country of Georgia, who has uploaded over 100,000 land titles to a blockchain network created by BitFury. They have decided that using blockchain smart contracts will help them prove land ownership as Russia slowly begins to occupy more and more of their land. Dubai has also decided to use the Ethereum architecture to manage its data and bring their country into the 21^st century.

Many other countries have taken notice. In Haiti, for example, after the earthquake in 2010, the first building to fall into ruin was the building that held all of their public records. In seconds, all the paperwork that documented who owned what land was gone. My own town of Santa Cruz, CA, is always under earthquake threat, could moving their local government data to a blockchain system help them in the long run? Of course it can.

Money will be saved by adopting these new technologies for data management. According to an article in August 2017, the government of Dubai expects to, “Reduce the cost of document processing by billions of dollars through eliminating manual processing of residencies, passport documentation and visas through a partnership with ConsenSys.”

Billions of dollars, eh? And what to do with those savings? Why not redistribute them back into the community as a universal basic income? This can be done by tokenizing the endeavor, and backing the initial release of the coins with the savings the governmental entity receives.

As governments begin to implement various blockchain schemes to manage their data it is the ideal moment for them to tokenize the blockchain ledger they’re creating and distribute those tokens to their citizens as a universal basic income.

Consider Santa Cruz. Recently named the fourth most expensive place to live in the nation, it is estimated that our cost of living is 81% higher than the national average and our housing costs are 208% higher than the national average. When I drive down the street near town, I see tents nestled in along the highway, back near the fences and hidden in tall grasses. At night, when you pass our city hall, the courtyard is filled with people in sleeping bags, trying to find a place to sleep. Beggars line our downtown mall. Truly if any town needed a universal basic income, it’s ours.

Perhaps UBI begins at home with our local city council opting to invest in building a blockchain ledger using Ethereum to manage all contracts regarding land in the county as well as all legal documentation and contracts stored in the courthouse. The project includes tokens that are backed by the city at first with the monies annually saved by efficiently managing and securing their data. These tokens are distributed evenly to every citizen over 18 on a monthly basis.

As time goes on, more data can be added to the ledger and with each savings by switching from the manual handling of the data to digital networks doing the job, that money is used to issue new coins to citizens. The basic income could start at one number, say $500/month with the intention of growing to a final amount that can sustain a human being within the county.

In addition, more tokens are created as incentives to encourage people to enter the system as miners to help maintain the ledger. This is the decentralization aspect, the data is stored across hundreds of servers rather than just one. Thus everyone gets a set amount, but those who mine create more coins that they can use to purchase items in the community, or trade on the exchange, thus increasing the value of the tokens. Tokens can also be given to businesses as a means of encouraging them to accept LifeCoin as payment for their goods and services. With time, the currency spreads throughout the city and county, and as a result is accepted at more and more locations. None of this is because we “took” money from somewhere else. Using blockchain technologies, money was freed up to invest in a new currency, one that exists for the sole purpose of providing a living to our citizens.

Now, this is a very basic sketch of the system, and one I’m not able to complete. I’m merely putting it out there as something to debate and discuss, with the hopes that minds much more crypto than mine can see that their work has this potential. And perhaps to get the political dialogue rolling. This has to start somewhere and we can’t wait for our federal government to help. I also realize that as with any monetary system, cryptocurrencies may not be able to address the potential inflation and deflation associated with a universal basic income. 

My good friend and fellow Medium writer, John Eden, put it perfectly:

"My view is that the real worry about crypto-powered UBI has nothing to do with the power of the blockchain from a tech POV.  The problem is that any economic system with a fixed or variable amount of tokens can and will experience inflation and deflation.  To me, this basic economic fact can't in any way to neutralized by blockchain.  The implication of this is that the token one designs for UBI must be created in partnership with some pretty thoughtful economists so that a method of adjusting the value of the token relative to the wider economy is built into the token infrastructure.  After all, you don't want to create LifeCoin only to see inflation ruin it's core purpose - i.e., giving the most vulnerable members of society the ability to live a decent life."

I'm not sure where we'd find those thoughtful economists. Can our local governments implement a token system to help the poor while keeping in mind the long term economic monetary policy goals? The blockchain might not save us from this issue, but the currency created can be set up with a new set of rules than our regular fiat, especially since it would be it's own new market, individualized at the local level. We've been manipulating the markets forever, is it any different for a township to create it's own currency to establish a standard of living?

We could also leave the government out of this and instead take responsibility as private citizens, creating a universal reward token ourselves. Private citizens can create a coin that is then given to those who need it. This work has already begun. GrantCoin was established in 2015 with the intent of providing a UBI to those who meet their criteria. However, this feels more like charitable handouts than a true UBI, for it’s still based on need, which requires judgement by a group of people who get to determine whether or not you really need it. Universal Basic Income is not only about providing the basics to all in a world of plenty, it’s also about freeing us from the judgments of others. We all receive a universal basic income, that’s what makes it universal, and we’re trusted to do what we should with it. Still, GrantCoin is a good start.

Another idea that caught my eye was the concept of gamifying cryptocurrencies as a means of deploying them. In an incredibly passionate plea to save cryptocurrencies from big business, author Daniel Jeffries writes, 

“By gamifying money distribution, we spread it far and wide across the playing field, as fast as possible, and guarantee that the system becomes viable. We bootstrap the system from banana republic to global powerhouse. That will bring powerful economic players into the system, who will then be incentivized to protect it and expand it.

If we move swiftly, we can unleash the true power of the blockchain to unlock the frozen reserves of human potential, rise from the ashes of our crumbling political systems and rocket into a whole new level of economic potential and development.”

He goes on to explain how by using a killer gaming app along with a universal reward token, one could possibly build a cryptocurrency that is completely decentralized with the possibility to not only fund life, but allow the movement to build into smart contracts and other aspects of civilization. Instead of the government initiating the move to the blockchain, private citizens do it for each other, via games so fun to play, we play them for a living. His article on Medium is a worthy read if this sort of idea floats your boat.

This may seem a bit pie in the sky, and on some level it is, but when thinking about the future of money we have the ability to write a whole new story, so why not base it upon joy and games?

Regardless, as financial firms explore the possibilities that platforms like Ethereum bring, it may benefit us to begin to probe our local governments into doing the same. However, instead of keeping the profits for themselves, they could the adventure to create new systems of money that promote life and health for all citizens.

A Feminist Case for Universal Basic Income

It’s in the news. From the Zuck to Elon Musk, dire warnings are being issued about the impact of technological unemployment on our society—unless we begin to implement some sort of universal basic income, or UBI. For those who are new to this concept, a basic income is defined on Wikipedia as:

A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, Citizen's Income, unconditional basic income, universal basic income (UBI), or universal demogrant^[2]) is a form of social security^[3] in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive a regular, unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

Many basic income supporters believe that it should be enough to meet a person's basic needs. For this reason, an unconditional income transfer of less than the poverty line is sometimes called a partial basic income while one greater than that level is sometimes called a full basic income.

I’ve written about this topic before, my first blog on UBI garnered more than 50,000 hits on Reddit at one time, and has since gone on to have thousands of reads on Medium and shares on Facebook & Twitter. I’ve seen this sort of success with UBI articles by other writers as well, this topic is obviously on everyone’s mind.

There are many excellent articles on the why, how and what all over the internet, but today I want to look at it from a feminist perspective—specifically from a mother’s perspective, and why UBI is so important for the raising of the next generation.

Before I start, let’s address all the “A woman is so much more than a mother!!!” shrieks out there. Yes, this is true, however 57% of American women between the ages of 15-50 are mothers, so the work that comes with caring for children is absolutely being done by the majority of females, on a daily basis, and very little of it is paid or even acknowledged as work.

The raising of children, as well as the work of caring for a home, is completely unseen by our society. This is obvious when you hear people bemoan the idea of a world without paid work as we’ve defined it. They say things like, “Without work, humans will go mad” or “What will people do with themselves if they don’t have jobs?” When I hear those statements, I know that the person making them has NEVER been a housewife, because they have no appreciation for the work of life.

What is the work of life? Let’s start with something we all have—a body. If you have one, then you will admit that to have a body means that life is work. You must clean it, feed it, clothe it, and shelter it. You should also exercise it and keep it flexible. This is the minimum amount of work that you do every day, just to care for yourself! In order to achieve the work of the body, most of us work for money to pay for food, clothing, shelter and health care. So automatically, we’re pulled into the employment system through necessity. But even before the modern industrial world, the majority of one’s life was spent procuring the things the body needs to stay alive.

Thus, we all have a body, and those of us who are fortunate, also have a shelter for that body, which also takes a lot of effort. Caring for and maintaining the home is definitely work, and either you make enough money to hire someone to do this for you, or you do it yourself, ON TOP of your paid employment.

Now, for the 57% of American women between the ages of 15-50, who also have children, multiply the work of the body times the work of the house and then raise it to the power of 10. Yes, children add that much more work to the equation. This work must be done, regardless if the mother is also employed in paid work.

Some women chose to stay-at-home to raise the kids and do all the householder chores. As a matter-of-fact, in 2014, that number rose to 29% from 23% in 1999. This is the first time in 20 years that number increased. Regardless of the whys of that choice, this means that of the 57% of women who are mothers, almost a third are providing childcare and home labor without any wages.

Even for the women who are working jobs outside of the home, the work of the home STILL EXISTS, they just do it instead of sleeping. They rush from work to daycare to get the kid, drive the kid around to after-school activities, grocery shop, cook dinner, help with homework, get the kids to bed, clean the house, do the laundry, pay the bills, go to bed way too late and then get up the next day to do it all again.

In a nutshell, the work of life is constant, mostly unpaid, and mostly done by women.

From the beginning, feminism has been trying to share this unpaid, yet entirely unavoidable, workload with our male counterparts, and this is absolutely the right idea. However, it does nothing to address the fact that even shared, this crucial work is happening every day and is unaccounted for as work in the “real” world. None of this work can be left undone, if it is ignored, society will pay for it in social ills. Yet women (and the men who share caregiving with them) are not compensated in any way. Worse, this work isn’t even included in the 40 hour work week that we all revere as the holy standard of honest employment. It’s as if any of the work it takes to care for our bodies, our physical homes, and of course the bodies of our children, isn’t real. Listen to an economist or our politicians talk, and you’d think we’re all Samantha from Bewitched, wiggling our noses and taking care of the home in an instant.

Many of our families are struggling to balance work and family, and it has become nearly impossible for a single income family to even rent a two-bedroom apartment. Even dual employment at the median wage won’t buy a home in most marketplaces. There are real issues when our children are left behind for the almighty dollar, and a universal basic income could help relieve some of the stress that families face when it comes to parenting.

Imagine, if when a woman started her family, she knew her food and shelter were guaranteed? Now she can choose to work out of the home based on her ability to manage the needs of her family, home and her career, not merely to keep the roof over her kids’ heads.

Imagine, if a woman finds herself in an abusive relationship, she could leave her husband knowing that she will be able to provide the basics for her children, no matter what?

Imagine, if a woman is faced with a very sick child, could take time off to help that child heal and address the medical issues, without fear of losing her home?

Imagine, if a woman finds herself truly desiring to stay home to raise her children, she has the means to do so because society honors the work of the home?

Imagine, if a woman loses her partner, and finds herself alone but without worry at this time of crisis because her home is guaranteed and thus her children are safe?

Imagine, if a man finds himself without his wife, he can continue to raise his children without the fear of losing his home?

Imagine, if a young woman finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and not entirely prepared, she is able to face it without shame or fear of providing for the child, even if she chooses to go at it alone?

Imagine, if a young man in the same situation can offer to raise his child and care for it, even if that means going at it alone?

Can you even imagine a world where caring for others isn’t seen as a burden?

For too long, feminism has turned its head away from mothers and the real work of raising a family, pretending that it doesn’t matter, or change a thing when it comes to success in our economic story. This is a mistake, for in shaming what society has called, “women’s work” we join the misogyny of our world. We pretend that this model of success, aimed only at personal wealth and power, is actually healthy, denying the fact that others do indeed need to be cared for. Those in power have been scorning and taking advantage of caregivers since the dawn of the industrial age and feminism should fight this, not enable it.

If your efforts don’t produce profit, they’re meaningless—this is our economic world, and it’s tearing us apart.

Perhaps it’s this very misogyny that makes welfare and social services so distasteful to a large percent of Americans? Perhaps this disdain for caregiving, and the women who do it, is the real reason UBI is seen as the ultimate handout, or a failure to take care of yourself, because should we implement it, the first people to take advantage of it will be the 57% of women who are mothers, already working hours a day, seven days a week, for no wage at all.

Sometimes we have to take care of caregivers so that they can take care of their kids. Is this such a bad thing? Is this a sexist thing? Or is it just a natural part of our human existence that some of us need to be cared for and others of us are called to do that caring?

What is the point of being human if the only work that is revered is the work that has nothing to do with caring and only with consuming?

While it’s important to continue to share caregiving between men and women, it’s also important to create a society where caregiving is not a liability, but rather an act of service that we all appreciate. Even if you aren’t a parent, you have benefitted from caregiving, otherwise you wouldn't be here. Honestly, it takes more than a Hallmark holiday every year to show our appreciation. Creating a world where UBI is our foundation would go a lot further towards equality between the sexes, for in doing so we acknowledge that the work of the home is real, and we free women from the economic constraints that childrearing has come to bear upon us, much more than our male counterparts.

Universal basic income as a part of the feminist agenda only makes sense. Think of  it, what if in addition to fighting for education and the right to work and income equality, we also fought for a living wage when it comes to the work of life, thus freeing childcare and mothering from the misogyny that has disdained it for far too long? Many men are fighting for UBI as a means to save themselves from a wage-less future--what have women, many of whom have been wage-less workers for decades, been waiting for?