One Dear Land: A Better World Through Information, Universal Basic Income, Community, World Government, and Infinitism

By Ellen Hadley and Marie Janicke

Imagine in your next life you might be in any random situation (ignorant, poor, unhealthy, living with war or a mentally-ill family member, etc.) and you can’t predict it. What changes would this make you want in our systems of information, economics, community, government, and religion?

If you decide to work for one of these changes now, which should you pursue? It might seem prudent to focus on one in isolation, but it wouldn’t be enough. Other systems could work against it. And, though you might initially get more allies than if you talked about other systems, you could lose those allies if they began to suspect your overall vision conflicted with theirs. 

By looking at how changes in many systems fit together from as many perspectives as possible, you might be able to reach deeper agreement with others on a big-picture vision. Then, you could move the components forward together with greater trust, watching each system changing and facilitating change in the others.

That’s what this book, first written in 1990 yet amazingly relevant, tries to do, both in essay and in novel form.

The essay discusses the internet, free enterprise enhanced by universal basic income (UBI), community centers with publicly-funded workers providing universal basic services at UBI-affordable prices, world government, and a religion that helps people identify with the plights of others. The novel tells an inspiring human story of a couple as they marry and become grandparents while helping to develop these systems.

This second edition has a new foreword to help integrate these ideas into the real world. 

It will be wonderful if any of the ideas in this book stimulate you. Even better, this book may help you develop a cohesive worldview, perhaps even one you can share with others in moving our world forward.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665542180

Ellen Hadley

Ellen Hadley, a graduate of the University of Rochester, has had a decades-long interest in religion, economics, and world peace. Born shortly before the Great Depression, she eagerly walked to church services every morning as a child, moved when her parents could no longer afford their home, and saw her four brothers go off to World War II. As a young mother in the 60’s, she watched race riots and social upheaval. She studied Russian as a hobby throughout the Cold War. She was middle-aged during the Viet Nam War and the U.S. debates whether a basic income guarantee should give everyone should a fair shot while preserving private enterprise. Her memories of the catastrophic consequences of economic failure, world conflict, and social inequity made her yearn for a belief system that would help people want to make the world better not only for themselves, their own descendants, and their own people, but also for any random individual born in the future into any circumstances in the world. She did in fact develop such a belief system, naming it Infinitism. Then, following her own Infinitist ideals, she thought hard about how the systems of the world could be changed so that whatever lot a person was born into, that person would have his best possible life. Her solutions hinge on universal basic income (UBI), which both aids and is aided by the changes in community and world government she also proposes. She is now in her 90’s. Although she wrote this book three decades ago, she still hopes fervently that its ideas will help people. She’s publishing this second edition, along with a new Foreword to put it into historical perspective, in hopes that you will join in on imagining, and working toward, the creation of One Dear Land.

Book preview

One Dear Land:

A Better World through Information, Universal Basic Income, Community, World Government, and Infinitism

By

Ellen Hadley

Second edition,

With a new foreword by Marie Janicke

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2021 Ellen Hadley. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/12/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4214-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4218-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my late husband Harry, and our daughter Marie and son Howard, who proofread my manuscript and made many valuable suggestions for improving it. I am grateful to them for the assistance they gave me on every step of the way to finishing the book and submitting it for publication. God bless them all!

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

My mom, the author of One Dear Land, believes we’re on this planet to make a positive difference. She even developed a religion, Infinitism, based on each of us trying to improve the quality of life on earth and to empower future world inhabitants to do the same. We can better identify the best ways to change the world if we picture that we could be re-born into it in any possible situation and can’t predict right now what that situation would be. Maybe we would be living elsewhere, maybe we would have different abilities, disabilities, interests, and personalities, maybe we would be subject to prejudice, neglect, or violence. What could we change now to improve our potential to thrive and contribute under whatever conditions our next life dealt us?

Well, at a minimum, you’d need enough money to survive in your next life. But, even in the United States, a country with millions of millionaires and over 700 billionaires, too many people are inhibited from making the world better because they lack the financial resources to concentrate on much more than short-term survival. Mom and I think one crucial step our society could make toward improving human lives and motivating people to work toward positive change for all would be to grant everyone enough money to survive, that is, a full basic income, on top of which people could work to earn more.

Mom started writing this book on basic income in 1989, when I was in my mid-thirties and almost no one in the U.S. was talking about basic income. Now, it’s 2021, I’m a grandma, and basic income is hot. The last time basic income was hot in the U.S. was half a century ago. Fifty years ago today, in September 1971, I was starting my junior year of high school, and legislation for a partial basic income had passed the House of Representatives. I wasn’t paying attention then, but I’ve recently researched the rise and fall of the basic income movement during my high school years in preparation for writing the Foreword to this second edition of Mom’s book. I’ll start this Foreword by sharing what I learned.

In the 60’s, when I was a child, the main program in the U.S. to provide cash to the needy was called Aid to Assist Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). AFDC had been created decades earlier for families in which the father was deceased, absent, or unable to work. AFDC was means-tested, meaning that to get it, you had to be poor. If a mother receiving AFDC started earning more or got married, she’d lose the benefit. That seemed okay when AFDC was started, because back then, people didn’t think mothers who’d lost their husbands should have to work or should need help if they re-married.

However, it was becoming more common for mothers to work, and people started to resent the non-working mothers enrolled in AFDC, especially the ones who had never married. There was concern that the way things were set up made single motherhood the clearest pathway to receiving cash assistance, provided no incentive for recipients to get jobs, and provided insufficient help to other people who needed financial assistance.

In 1962, the noted libertarian economist Milton Friedman suggested the nation dismantle its costly, intrusive, and discriminatory system for judging who did and did not deserve AFDC and replace it with a system that automatically ensured that everyone--regardless of whether or not they were working, married, or had kids--was guaranteed an income they could count on for life’s essentials. To ensure a minimum income, Friedman proposed that when people did their income taxes, they should receive a credit if they earned below a threshold amount. The credit would be largest for households with no income but would taper off as recipients earned more until they reached the threshold earnings, creating less of a work disincentive than the sudden loss of benefits that occurred when mothers on AFDC took work.

By 1966, Martin Luther King was advocating for a guaranteed minimum income for all. A set of multi-year pilots was begun in 1967, under the administration of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, testing different variations on Friedman’s proposal (i.e., different sized income guarantees and different rates at which the credit was rescinded as a function of increased earnings). It seemed pretty obvious that more unemployed mothers would work if their benefits were retracted less suddenly as a consequence of working than they had been under AFDC. So, that was not the studies’ focus. What was tested instead was a fear: how much low-income people who already had jobs would reduce work under different guaranteed income schemes.

Meanwhile, 1,200 economists wrote Congress requesting income guarantees and supplements. In 1969, Republican President Richard Nixon proposed a guaranteed income plan. It was similar to Friedman’s but was restricted to families with children and had measures to try to push enrollees toward jobs.

In 1972, although Nixon’s plan had been passed by the Democrat-controlled House, it was still being argued in the Democrat-controlled Senate. George McGovern was campaigning to be the Democratic Presidential nominee, and McGovern proposed a basic income plan too. While Nixon had proposed a guaranteed income at about half the poverty level, making it a partial basic income, McGovern proposed an income guarantee at the poverty line, making it a full basic income.

One of the most influential opponents of Nixon’s guaranteed income plan was the Southern Democrat Russell Long, a member of the Senate Finance Committee from 1953 to 1987 and its Chairman from 1966 to 1981. Long believed it was wrong for anyone unemployed to get government aid unless they were deemed deserving by authorities. He also was against single parenthood and realized that basic income would empower dependent women to leave relationships. To inhibit Nixon’s basic income plan from passing, Long kept delaying the Senate from voting on it. During the delays, there was vying between parties over which party would look better, between states for money, and between government agencies over the fate of each existing welfare program that guaranteed income might replace. Some thought that Nixon’s plan was too expensive, and some thought it too stingy.

In October 1972, Nixon’s plan was dropped, despite preliminary pilot results showing that on average, low-income workers who were guaranteed a partial basic income only slightly reduced their hours and did not significantly reduce their earnings. In November, Nixon was re-elected but never pursued guaranteed income.

As more pilot experiments were completed, it remained clear that even in arms of experiments that tested generous credits well over the poverty line, most people kept working, likely because most people want more than the basics and because many find purpose in work (even lottery winners often keep working!). Reported work reductions for low-wage workers averaged on the order of the equivalent of 2 weeks per year for husbands, 3 for women, and 4 for youth. We know that the actual reduction was even less, because it was discovered that (unsurprisingly) some recipients under-reported work to maximize their benefit. Analysis suggested reductions mainly reflected husbands being empowered to leave jobs and spend time looking for better ones, working-class wives being empowered to spend more time with their children, and lower-class young adults being empowered to spend more time on their education, training, or attempts to start a business. Not all low-wage workers worked less when guaranteed a partial basic income. Some worked more, perhaps having been empowered to find and pursue opportunities that were more engaging and had more potential.

In only one of the four large guaranteed income pilot studies begun in the 60’s and 70’s did initial results give cause for worry that basic income was threatening marriage and other close relationships, and that was disputed upon completion and re-analysis of the study. Likely, relationships broken by women having increased financial freedom were overall balanced by relationships stabilized by decreased financial-distress-related conflict between partners.

Despite these encouraging pilot experiment results, guaranteed income was pretty much taken off the table after 1972. In 1975, under Republican President Gerald Ford, Russell Long successfully pushed for passage of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which provided financial aid only to people with jobs.

Nixon had three key problems with his plan to help all poor families by crediting the unemployed a partial basic income and reducing it gradually as earnings approached the poverty line. Mom has solutions to all three, solutions I consider vital to basic income’s future success.

First, some objected to paying to allow lower-class people to survive without working. They thought it unfair to workers, unless perhaps the recipients were deserving, like widowed mothers of babies. And, indeed, it may be unfair—if workers are not also given the same amount of money. They also thought it threatened business. In Nixon’s plan, credit is reduced as individuals work more, so jobs that don’t pay enough may not be worth taking. Nixon’s plan also facilitated individuals negotiating raises by withholding work, which without guaranteed income is difficult unless they belong to striking unions. These combined influences could drive up worker wages and cost employers money or lead them to compensate for lower-tier employee raises by limiting upper-tier pay or by increasing prices.

Mom’s solution is that everyone get survival funds in equal amount, on top of which they can earn more, a concept now called unconditional universal basic income, UBI. UBI is a more like a dividend than like welfare; it helps every soul survive and self-determine. As long as we’re not giving the dividend to some but not others, we don’t need to judge who deserves it. And, because people wouldn’t lose their government funding with work and thus need their pay high enough to compensate, UBI would create less pressure for raise demands than Nixon’s plan. UBI would still empower lower-tier workers to demand raises for undesirable underpaid jobs, but compared to Nixon’s plan, UBI would better free them to hold desirable low-paid jobs, including internships and jobs that suit their lifestyle, jobs that otherwise only the rich can afford to hold. Thus, compared to basic income plans that are targeted to the poor alone, UBI is less likely to create problematic wage demands and also encourages a positive employer response to stronger worker bargaining power: competing for workers by making jobs enjoyable and fulfilling.

The second problem with Nixon’s plan was that its reliance on income tax created unnecessary work and marriage penalties. To target benefits to those below the poverty line, Nixon’s plan imposed marginal income tax rates of 66.7 percent on people working to escape poverty, more than three times what people just above the poverty line had to pay. Surely, it disincentivizes work to tax the poor such that they get to keep only 33.3 cents on the dollar of their earnings from their already low-paid jobs. This is especially so in view of the costs of working, i.e., clothing, transportation, child care, stress, reduced time for preparing inexpensive meals, etc. The marriage disincentive of income tax comes from benefits based on it generally being less per person in larger households. The reasoning is that when people share expenses, they don’t need as much. But, if you tell someone that if they don’t live with others, they will get more per person than if they do, you disincentivize marriage and co-living. That’s unfortunate, because living with others is more cost-effective and makes child-rearing easier.

The small but measured declines in work and relationship stability in low-paid employed families in some pilot experiments testing Nixon’s plan were particularly damaging because the plan had been devised partially to reduce work and marriage disincentives that the then-existing plan created for the unemployed. Income-tax-related work and co-living penalties are particularly undesirable because they discourage people from jobs or relationships they want to be in, in contrast to guaranteed income itself which merely frees people to leave jobs or relationships that they want to leave.

The problem of penalizing work would persist if income tax were used to finance UBI. McGovern proposed giving every man, woman, and child $1,000 annually and changing the income tax system to a 30 percent tax rate. When income tax was considered, the upper middle class would have received no net benefit. Some of them were indignant at the idea of having their work earnings penalized to give money to lower-middle-class people who may have been not working as hard as they were.

Mom’s solution is to instead couple UBI to a national sales tax on goods and services. Sales tax doesn’t penalize work. The rich as a group would still end up paying more money because they spend more than the poor. A system of sales tax and UBI is easily run on a per person basis and thus avoids punishing marriage too.

The third problem Nixon’s program encountered was that the fate of non-cash portions of the existing system of government benefits was not adequately addressed in the legislation or in the pilots surrounding it. This complicated interpretation of pilot results, because people who avoided work while receiving cash credits may have been doing so partly to retain non-cash benefits that could have been suddenly retracted had they worked. The lack of clarity also made both sides distrust what would happen under a basic-income system. To Republicans, a main advantage of guaranteed income was eliminating administrative excess and work disincentives for the unemployed. We wouldn’t be doing that if we kept much of our social benefits bureaucracy and still strongly disincentivized work through non-cash benefit systems such as housing and food. Some Democrats thought, though, that it wasn’t enough to give poor people money, that we still needed non-cash benefits to help the poor personally and with budgeting and ensure they could afford their needs.

Mom again has a solution. She proposes reducing work disincentives from non-cash benefits but ensuring people get need goods and access to counseling, all through a beautiful plan to provide UBI-affordable non-cash benefits and counseling universally through community centers.

Now I’ll relate how Mom came to write this book on UBI in 1989, when, to most people, giving everyone survival money just for being alive was unthinkable.

That year, Ted Turner announced a $500,000 award for the best new novel offering positive solutions to global problems. Mom was intrigued at this potential way to spread her ideas. Writing a book would require grit and fervor. But, her father and his brothers all had been police reporters for Chicago papers back in organized-crime days and had altogether written two dozen books and an Academy-award nominated screenplay. Two of those uncles were priests. One had appeared on billboards as America’s Star Reporter then helped start Madonna House apostolate with his wife, a former baroness who is now a candidate for sainthood. That’s a lot of family grit and fervor! Some of it apparently made its way to Mom (gentle soul though she is), because she set to work with ferocity writing One Dear Land, with the blessings of my sweet dad.

The world-wide web was not yet public, but Mom saw its potential to inform and to catalyze change, and she added internet usage to her list of goals. She also envisioned a world government to share improved systems around the globe, and she wrote about that too.

There were thousands of entrants, and Mom wasn’t the winner. But, the contest gave the impetus to get the book done, in 1990. Mom published One Dear Land in 2004 with the novel as Part II of the book. Part I of One Dear Land was Mom’s discussion of the five systems that were changed during the course of the novel’s story: information, economics, community, world government, and religion. In this second edition of Mom’s book, we’ve kept her novel and Part I discussion unchanged other than interchanging Mom’s original definitions of Soul and Spirit and moving her Religion section from the start to the end of Part I.

In Mom’s novel, a young Infinitist named Hope marries a basic-income advocate named John. The story starts in a 1990 world and finishes a generation and a half later. That’s about 30 years, which places the end of the novel about now, 2021. In the rest of this Foreword, I’ll discuss what actually transpired from 1990 until now with respect to our systems of information, economics, community, world government, and religion. You’ll see Mom was rather prophetic! I’ll also discuss how, with some grit and fervor, we just might make Mom’s vision a reality yet!

Information

The system that has changed the most in the direction that Mom proposed is our information system. The internet was still being invented when Mom wrote this book. Now, we depend on it to evaluate products and services, look up facts, and find and communicate with others with common interests. Political candidates save money on travel and advertising by campaigning online. We get news online from outside the mainstream media. We can share our own thoughts too, giving us a voice that the common person never before had. The internet also lets us work, study, and video-chat from afar, simplifying our lives, helping us drive less to keep our environment healthier, and allowing us to function during the COVID-19 pandemic going on as I write this. All of this is so vital that I think we should ensure high-speed internet access to all.

A perfect illustration of the internet’s role in progress is the journey Mom and I took in advocating for basic income. I loved Mom’s ideas when she told me about them. However, since Mom’s book didn’t win Ted Turner’s competition, it didn’t get much publicity, so not many bookstores carried it and not many people saw it. Remember, there were no e-books or online searches or reviews. So where could we go from there? Variants of basic income have been proposed for hundreds of years but, in 1990, basic income was an idea that was unfamiliar, even kooky-sounding, to the general public. Letters-to-the-editor on basic income were therefore generally rejected by newspapers.

As it turns out, public awareness of basic income was facilitated by the ability that the internet gave people outside the mainstream media to share ideas with ease. After Mom published One Dear Land, we were delighted to learn through the internet of a group of other individuals who also were UBI advocates, the USBIG (U.S. Basic Income Guarantee) Network, founded in 1999. Through USBIG, we learned of BIEN (the Basic Income Earth Network), an international UBI advocacy group founded in 1986. We attended USBIG and BIEN meetings, handing out copies of Mom’s book and talking with the movement’s leaders. Ever since, I’ve watched UBI’s online presence grow.

Further societal progress will likely rely on the internet, so we must protect it from censorship and safeguard its integrity. The internet can spread untruths, as can newspapers, books, TV, and radio. A key positive difference, as Mom noted, is that others can respond online in a way they can’t do for traditional media. Websites don’t always have a place for public comment, though, and I think they should. The automatic fact-checks that social media use could help, but they would be less likely to cross into censorship if they instead were labeled more information. A big problem is that advertising promotes falsehoods and polarization, both online and in the mainstream media, because eliciting anger gets views. By reducing financial desperation, basic income might reduce the number of people prolifically making anger-inducing click-triggering postings online just to earn a buck. We might benefit from reinstating the former requirement that mainstream media provide both sides of a story, from providing more public funding of our news, and from moving toward an internet that is a public service, as Mom envisioned, rather than funded by competition for clicks. Mom’s most radical suggestion for increasing honesty and decreasing unfounded suspicions is to make financial transactions and government negotiations publicly viewable online. We’ve done that a little, but I think we should do it more.

We also need to learn to listen and speak to others in a way that engenders understanding and compromise, accepting the truth in points made by those who disagree with us and the flaws in points that support our own views. These are skills well modeled by the protagonists in One Dear Land. It will be easier for people to communicate rationally and productively if they become less stressed by finances and time. One way we can help take people out of an