Regular Version

Framework
I value morality.
The standard is minimizing material violence.
Personal identity reductionism is true
1. Fission – if the hemispheres of my brain were transplanted into two different
people neither would be me
Parfit 84. Derek Parfit 1984, “Reasons and Persons”, Oxford Paperbacks
It is in fact true that one
hemisphere is enough. There are many people who have survived, when a stroke or
injury puts out of action one of their hemispheres . With his remaining hemisphere, such a person may need to re-learn
certain things, such as adult speech, or how to control both hands. But this is possible. In my example I am assuming that, as may be true of
certain actual people, both of my hemispheres have the full range of abilities. I could thus survive with either hemisphere, without any need for
re-learning.¶ I shall now combine these last two claims. I
would survive if my brain was successfully transplanted into
my twin's body. And I could survive with only half my brain , the other half having been destroyed . Given
these two facts, it seems clear that I would survive if half my brain was successfully transplanted into my twin's body, and the other half was
destroyed.¶ What if the other half was not destroyed? This is the case that Wiggins described: that in which a person, like an amoeba,
divides.40 To simplify the case, I assume that I am one of three identical triplets. Consider ¶ My Division. My
body is fatally injured, as
are the brains of my two brothers. My brain is divided , and each half is successfully transplanted into the
body of one of my brothers. Each of the resulting people believes that he is me, seems to remember living my life, has my character,
and is in every other way psychologically continuous with me. And he has a body that is very like mine.¶ This case is likely to remain impossible.
Though it is claimed that, in certain people, the two hemispheres may have the same full range of abilities, this claim might be false. I am here
assuming that this claim is true when applied to me. I am also assuming that it would be possible to connect a transplanted half-brain with the
nerves in its new body. And I am assuming that we could divide, not just the upper hemispheres, but also the lower brain. My first two
assumptions may be able to be made true if there is enough progress in neurophysiology. But it seems likely that it would never be possible to
divide the lower brain, in a way that did not impair its functioning.¶ Does it matter if, for this reason, this imagined case of complete division will
always remain impossible? Given the aims of my discussion, this does not matter. This impossibility is merely technical. The one feature of the
case that might be held to be deeply impossible—the division of a person's consciousness into two separate streams—is the feature that has
actually happened. It would have been important if this had been impossible, since this might have supported some claim about what we really
are. It might have supported the claim that we are indivisible Cartesian Egos. It therefore matters that the division of a person's consciousness
is in fact possible. There seems to be no similar connection between a particular view about what we really are and the impossibility of dividing
and successfully transplanting the two halves of the lower brain. This
impossibility thus provides no ground for refusing to
consider the imagined case in which we suppose that this can be done . And considering this case may help us to
decide both what we believe ourselves to be, and what in fact we are. As Einstein's example showed, it can be useful to consider impossible
thought-experiments.¶ It may help to state, in advance, what I believe this case to show. It provides a further argument against the view that
we are separately existing entities. But the main conclusion to be hdrawn is that personal identity is not what matters .¶ It is
natural to believe that our identity is what matters. Reconsider the Branch-Line Case, where I have talked to my Replica on Mars, and am about
to die. Suppose we believe that I and my Replica are different people. It is then natural to assume that my prospect is almost as bad as ordinary
death. In a few days, there will be no one living who will be me. It is natural to assume that this is what matters. In discussing My Division, I shall
start by making this assumption.¶ In this case, each half of my brain will be successfully transplanted into the very similar body of one of my two
brothers. Both of the resulting people will be fully psychologically continuous with me, as I am now. What happens to me? ¶ There are only four
possibilities: (1) I do not survive; (2) I survive as one of the two people; (3) I survive as the other; (4) I survive as both. ¶ The objection to (1) is
this. I would survive if my brain was successfully transplanted. And people have in fact survived with half their brains destroyed. Given these
facts, it seems clear that I would survive if half my brain was successfully transplanted, and the other half was destroyed. So how could I fail to
survive if the other half was also successfully transplanted? How could a double success be a failure? ¶ Consider the next two possibilities.
Perhaps one success is the maximum score. Perhaps I shall be one of the two resulting people. The objection here is that, in this case, each half
of my brain is exactly similar, and so, to start with, is each resulting person. Given these facts, how can I survive as only one of the two people?
What can make me one of them rather than the other?¶ These three possibilities cannot be dismissed as incoherent. We can understand them.
But, while we assume that identity is what matters, (1) is not plausible. My Division would not be as bad as death. Nor are (2) and (3) plausible.
There remains the fourth possibility: that I survive as both of the resulting people. ¶ This possibility might be described in several ways. I might
first claim: ‘What we have called “the two resulting people” are not two people. They are one person. I do survive this operation. Its effect is to
give me two bodies, and a divided mind.’¶ This claim cannot be dismissed outright. As I argued, we ought to admit as possible that a person
could have a divided mind. If this is possible, each half of my divided mind might control its own body. But though this description of the case
cannot be rejected as inconceivable, it involves a great distortion in our concept of a person. In my imagined Physics Exam I claimed that this
case involved only one person. There were two features of the case that made this plausible. The divided mind was soon reunited, and there
was only one body. If
a mind was permanently divided, and its halves developed in different ways, it would
become less plausible to claim that the case involves only one person. (Remember the actual patient who complained
that, when he embraced his wife, his left hand pushed her away.) ¶ The case of complete division, where there are also two bodies, seems to be
a long way over the borderline. After I have had this operation, the two ‘products’ each have all of the features of a person. They could
live at opposite ends of the Earth. Suppose that they have poor memories, and that their appearance changes in different ways.
After many years, they might meet again, and fail even to recognise each other. We might have to claim of such a pair,
innocently playing tennis: ‘What you see out there is a single person, playing tennis with himself. In each half of his mind he mistakenly believes
that he is playing tennis with someone else.’ If we are not yet Reductionists, we believe that there is one true answer to the questionwhether
these two tennis-players are a single person. Given what we mean by ‘person’, the answer must be No. It
cannot be true that what I
believe to be a stranger, standing there behind the net, is in fact another part of myself.

Reductionism justifies util.

Gruzalski 86. Bart Gruzalski 86 [UChicago], “Parfit's Impact on Utilitarianism”, Ethics, Vol. 96, No. 4, July 1986.
Parfit concludes his discussion of distributive moral principles by claiming that, “when
we cease to believe that persons are
separately existing entities, the Utilitarian view becomes more plausible . Is the gain in plausibility great, or small? My
argument leaves this question open” (p. 342). In contrast, I have argued that the Reductionist View strongly supports the
utilitarian account of desert and distributive justice. The argument has two aspects. One is the recognition of the utilitarian emphasis on
secondary rules, including principles of distributive justice and policies of desert. These rules, principles, and policies are treated within the
utilitarian account as if they have self-standing, whereas in fact they are justified on the principle of utility which alone has self-standing within
the utilitarian program. The other aspect of the argument involves the recognition that the utilitarian’s dual treatment of secondary principles
dovetails with the dual account of the nature of persons on the Reductionist View: persons exist, yet their existence just involves bodies and
interrelated mental and physical events, and a complete description of our lives need not claim that persons exist. Furthermore, a
body,
brain, and interrelated series of mental and physical events are more fundamental and basic than the
person whose existence just consists in them , much as the citizens and the territory are more fundamental and basic than the
nation whose existence just consists in them. This corresponds precisely with the utilitarian account, for
utilitarianism treats persons as fundamental and separate existents, while grounding this treatment on
the impersonal elements of pain, suffering, happiness, and contentment. Because util- itarianism
accurately reflects in this way the true nature of persons, it is much more plausible than has been
previously recognized. In addition, since many of the current competitors to utilitarianism presuppose that the
person is separate from the body, brain, and interrelated mental and physical events, it follows that
these views err by being too personal and are therefore implausible. It follows that when we cease to
believe that persons are separately existing entities , utilitarianism becomes significantly more plausible
than any of its person-centered theoretical competitors.

Prefer consequentialism:
1. States must use util.
Goodin 90. Robert Goodin 90, [professor of philosophy at the Australian National University college of arts and social sciences], “The
Utilitarian Response,” pgs 141-142 //RS

My larger argument turns on the proposition that there

is something special about the situation of public officials that
makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I
must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about public officials and their situations that make it both more necessary and more
desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Publicofficials are
obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices –
public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will
usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the
ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, are relatively
poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals , one by one. What they
typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a
result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian
calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to choose general rules or conduct.

2. Particularism is key – overarching theories ignore material injustice.

Pappas 16. (Gregory Fernando Pappas [Texas A&M University] “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11,
Number 1, Spring 2016, BE

The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems
to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time , where the task of political
philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory
today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud,
Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a
critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this
approach
assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the
assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of
modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself . The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the
background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the
inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63) ¶ However, this particular approach
to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and
transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W.
Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history
of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical
perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to
how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction
to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed
how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often
described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12 ¶ Pragmatism only questions that
we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation
continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does
not deny
the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time , but
there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social
pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique,
context-bound injustice. To
capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study history but also
seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the
pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that
is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single
transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical
standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for
understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism ” can be great tools
that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the
categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are
nothing more than tools to
make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular
and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all, problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member
of a group in history, but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are homogeneously equal for all members of that group.
Why is this important? The possible pluralism and therefore complexity
of a problem of injustice does not always stop at
the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member of many groups, as insisted on by
intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir- cumstances to particular countries, towns,
neighborhoods, institutions, and ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive
inquiry. If an empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical
complexity, then this requires that we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences of injustice. ¶ Pragmatism
agrees with Sally Haslanger’s concern about Charles Mills’s view. She writes: “The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori- cal), but
is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about
and is perpetuated everywhere and at all times” (1). For “the
forces that cause and sustain domination vary
tremendously context by context, and there isn’t necessarily a single causal explanation; a theoretical
framework that is useful as a basis for political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social context” (1).13 ¶
Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can “formulate
tentative general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check the generalizations by applying them to still further
cases” (Dewey, Lectures in China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and was critical of how so many
sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and remaining at the level of “sweeping generalizations.” He states that they “ fail
to focus
on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems to be buried under their
sweeping generalizations” (Lectures in China 53).¶ The lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful
to not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis-
tence. Pragmatism welcomes the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on actual injustices, but it issues a
warning about how they should be understood and implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in critical race
theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bell’s valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of
American law. Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time and place, Bell learned and proposed certain
general principles such as the one of “interest convergence,” that is, “whites will promote racial advantages for blacks only when they also
promote white self-interest.”14 But, for pragma- tism, these principles are
nothing more than historically grounded tools
to use in present problematic situations that call for our analysis , such as deliberation in establishing public policies or
making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific
injustices. In testing their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of injustices we would not otherwise
appreciate.15
 The Advantage is Automation
The shift to automation is inevitable – acceleration of processes makes a transition
strategy vital.
Hobbs 2/16 (Andrew Hobbs. Hobbs is the Deputy Editor and Publisher of Internet of Business. “Automation will replace 9 percent of US
jobs in 2018”. 2-16-2018. Internet of Business. https://internetofbusiness.com/automation-global-workforce-2018/) //TruLe

2018 will be the year of the automation arms race , according to a new Forrester report. The paper makes ten
key predictions for the sector, and outlines how industry leaders can respond to the challenges that arise from them. In recent years,
companies have increasingly looked to automation to boost output, reduce inefficiencies, and cut labour
costs. And as robotic systems and AI become faster, smarter, and more affordable, this trend can only grow. While those who
master automation may flourish, suggest the analysts, there will still be obstacles to overcome along the
way. Perhaps the greatest of these is convincing the human workforce, and public, that automation will be a benefit. Theoretically, robotics
and AI will increasingly take on low-value, repetitive, replicable tasks, working alongside employees in administrative, sales, and service roles.
However, with blue-collar positions likely to take a hit, HR and PR departments will have their work cut out to sell the benefits. The
report
predicts that automation will replace nine percent of US jobs this year, offset slightly by a two percent
growth in roles supporting the “automation economy ”. [This is supported by Internet of Business’ own research. When the
US automotive sector purchased over 60,000 robots in 2016, it created 230,000 new human roles. As each robot can do the work of an
estimated 15 people, this means that 230,000 new jobs were created as 900,000 roles were automated.] The burden will be on business
leaders to draw up strategic workforce plans that will accommodate the new roles that automation creates or requires – and those that it
eliminates. However, these staffing shifts won’t happen overnight; the analysts suggest a five-to-ten-year process. So
it’s vital that
companies map out a transition strategy, while allowing for flexibility as technology evolves . This will help to
mitigate negative impacts on the workforce, says Forrester. But the transition won’t always be smooth, warns the company. As automation
becomes more overt, political backlashes will be inevitable. In 2017, 65 percent of Americans believed that other industries would suffer
because of automation, but that theirs would be unaffected. The
reality is that nearly all sectors will see increased
automation of one sort or another. As this realisation dawns, the shift to automation may falter,
suggests Forrester, but the broader economic arguments in favour of it will eventually win out. No
government will want to be outdone by more productive and more innovative neighbours, says the report. Infrastructure as code Automation is
also set to revamp the software side of the equation. RPA (robotic process automation) is the practice of using AI workers to carry out tasks that
have traditionally been done by employees, across a range of legacy programs. “In 2018, RPA-based digital workers will replace and/or augment
311,000 office and administrative positions, and 260,000 sales and related positions,” says the report. “As a result, the RPA software market will
remain heated, and double to $1.06 billion by the end of 2018.” The use of RPA, alongside robots, cobots, and collaboration tools, is also
enabling faster ops decisions. Infrastructure-as-code will find its way into the mainstream. Having matured to the point where it can handle
critical functions, software-defined storage and compute processes are on the rise in 2018. This is thanks to the ease of managing software-
defined infrastructures safely, reliably, and at scale. Internet of Business says The
deployment of automated processes is
accelerating as rapidly as the technology is advancing. Meanwhile AI – and increasingly software-based
workflows – will enable even faster tech rollouts. However, as the race to automate begins anew, it’s important to consider
the risks alongside the rewards, and to have a clear business strategy in place before looking for supportive technologies. When drawing up
technology roadmaps, it’s vital to consider the defining principles of the enterprise and how any changes might affect its ethos. And while
automation will play a central role in many organisations, employees define many of those enterprises, so it’s essential to manage internal
changes well to avoid sabotaging the organisation’s own values. Government policy will have to change to support both the rights of workers
and citizens’ ability to remain economically active – without stunting the opportunities that come with automation. The often-lacklustre pace of
reform in Westminster and Washington will be tested, even as companies champ at the bit of opportunity. Similarly, the security risks that
come with developing ever-more connected and software-based workflows are potentially huge. Significant investment is needed to support IT
teams in implementing new processes. Unfortunately, balance is something often lost in the hype cycle and the whirlwind of disruption, and it’s
important to maintain a sense of realism in line with long-term strategic goals. That said, all organisations should be prepared to be bold. As
Sean Culey says in his excellent, forward-looking report on PAL value chains and the IoT, if you don’t reinvent your business, someone else will.

Automation decimates jobs

Ratner 17 (Paul Ratner. Paul is a writer and filmmaker. “Over 30% of All American Jobs to Be Lost to Automation by 2030, Says New
Study”. 12-3-2017. Big Think. http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/a-new-study-says-a-third-of-all-us-workers-to-be-replaced-with-robots-by-2030)
//TruLe
Maybe your worries about having a robotic overlord are not warranted in the short term, but losing a job to a robot might be a fact of life that’s
just around the corner.A new study predicts that up to a third of all American jobs will be lost to automation
within the next 13 years. The study by McKinsey Global Institute, a think tank that specializes in business
and economics, says that nearly 70 million U.S. workers would have to find new occupations by 2030. This
will happen due to advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Machines will become better than humans
at a variety of skills, including some that require cognitive abilities. Automated technologies will also be
producing significantly fewer errors, allowing businesses to improve productivity, quality and speed .
Employing humans will become an illogical option in some professions. People would need retraining or enter completely new fields, concludes
the report’s co-author, Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute. “We believe that everyone will need to do retraining over
time,” he said, according to the Washington Post. The researchers believe the coming changes will affect people across different career levels.
Certain sectors will be affected more than others. By 2030, the demand for office workers, including anyone involved in administrative tasks,
should fall by 20%, predict the researchers. Up to 30%of the people in jobs requiring “predictable physical work” like in construction or the food
industry, for example, could lose their jobs as well. These are the types of activities inherent in some jobs that are more susceptible to be
replaced by automation: Jobs that require creativity or more human interaction, like being a lawyer, manager, a doctor or a teacher would be
less under the knife from automation, think the scientists. There could also be new type of jobs in supporting the technology that will arise. The
changes won’t just hit the U.S. but will reverberate around the world. The scientists say that up to 800 billion employees perform “technically
automatable activities” and will find themselves out of that work by 2030. On the flip side, the researchers say up to 280 million new jobs could
be created from increased spending on consumer goods and another 85 million jobs from more spending on health and education. These are
the U.S. industries most likely to be affected by automation: The authors see the looming transformation akin to what happened in the United
States and Europe in the early 1900s, when global industry switched from farming to factory work. Overall, their message is not one of doom.
They do not want to scare people but rather prepare for an inevitable transition, especially highlighting the need for mass retraining.

Income inequality causes econ decline and political instability.

Harkinson 11 (Josh Harkinson. Born in Texas and based in San Francisco, Josh covers tech, labor, drug policy, and the environment.
“Study: Income Inequality Kills Economic Growth”. 10-4-2011. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/study-income-
inequality-kills-economic-growth/) //TruLe

Corporate chieftains often claim that fixing the US economy requires signing new free trade deals, lowering government debt, and attracting
lots of foreign investment. But a major new study has found that those things matter less than an economic driver that CEOs hate talking about:
equality. "Countries where income was more equally distributed tended to have longer growth spells," says economist Andrew Berg, whose
study appears in the current issue of Finance & Development, the quarterly magazine of the International Monetary Fund. Comparing
six
major economic variables across the world's economies, Berg found that equality of incomes was the
most important factor in preventing a major downturn. (See top chart.) Andrew Berg & Jonathan Ostry Andrew Berg &
Jonathan OstryAndrew Berg & Jonathan Ostry In their study, Berg and coauthor Jonathan Ostry were less interested in looking at how to spark
economic growth than how to sustain it. "Getting growth going is not that difficult; it's keeping it going that is hard," Berg explains. For example,
the bailouts and stimulus pulled the US economy out of recession but haven't been enough to fuel a steady recovery. Berg's research suggests
that sky-high income inequality in the United States could be partly to blame. So how important is equality? According to the study,
making an economy's income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by
50 percent. In one case study, Berg looked at Latin America, which is historically much more economically stratified than emerging Asia and
also has shorter periods of growth. He found that closing half of the inequality gap between Latin America and Asia would more than double
the expected length of Latin America's growth spells. Increasing income inequality has the opposite effect: "We find that more inequality lowers
growth," Berg says. (See bottom chart.) Berg and Ostry aren't the first economists to suggest that income inequality can torpedo the economy.
Marriner Eccles, the Depression-era chairman of the Federal Reserve (and an architect of the New Deal),
blamed the Great Crash on the nation's wealth gap. "A giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an
increasing portion of currently produced wealth," Eccles recalled in his memoirs. "In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game
stopped." Many economists believe a similar process has unfolded over the past decade. Median
wages grew too little over the
past 30 years to drive the kind of spending necessary to sustain the consumer economy. Instead, increasingly
exotic forms of credit filled the gap, as the wealthy offered the middle class alluring credit card deals and variable-interest subprime loans. This
allowed rich investors to keep making money and everyone else to feel like they were keeping up—until the whole system imploded. Income
inequality has other economic downsides. Research suggests that unequal societies have a harder time getting their citizens to support
government spending because they believe that it will only benefit elites. A population where many lack access to health care, education, and
bank loans can't contribute as much to the economy. And,
of course, income inequality goes hand-in-hand with
crippling political instability, as we've seen during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. History shows
that "sustainable reforms are only possible when the benefits are widely shared," Berg says. "We hope that we don't have to relearn that the
hard way."

Employment is the best tool to fight poverty – empirics prove

Baker 16 (Dean Baker, 3-17-2016, "What the House Republican Budget Says About Conservative Anti-Poverty Rhetoric," Talk Poverty,
https://talkpoverty.org/2016/03/16/house-republican-budget-says-about-conservative-anti-poverty-rhetoric/) //SM

One of the most effective ways to combat poverty among current and future generations is to maintain
a full employment economy. The point should be straightforward: when the labor market is strong, or “tight,” it offers increased
employment opportunities for those at the bottom. Disadvantaged workers are not only more likely to find
employment in a tight labor market, they are also in a better position to secure higher wages as
employers are forced to compete for labor. This can allow millions of workers the opportunity to raise
themselves and their families out of poverty. We got a chance to see this story in practice in the boom of
the late 1990s, when the unemployment rate fell to its lowest levels in almost three decades, settling at
a year-round average of four percent in 2000, the peak year of the boom. In this period, wages rose
rapidly at all points along the income distribution, with workers at the bottom of the ladder actually
achieving the largest gains. The same principle would apply today , with the gains of a tight labor market
going disproportionately to the most disadvantaged . The unemployment rate for African-Americans is typically two to two-
and-a-half times that of whites. This means if we can lower the unemployment rate for whites by one percentage point, it is likely that the
unemployment rate for African-Americans will fall by two percentage points. For African-American teens, the ratio hovers near six to one,
meaning that a one percentage point drop in the white unemployment rate is likely to be associated with a six percentage point drop in the
unemployment rate for African-American teens. But even if we accept that full employment is especially important for the most disadvantaged
groups, there is still the question of how we get there. At
present, the biggest obstacle to higher levels of employment
is inadequate demand for goods and services in the economy. If there were more demand, we would
see more people employed.

Poverty is the worst form of structural violence.

Pogge 2 (Thomas Pogge. Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and is the Director of the Global Justice Program and
Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. “Poverty and Human Rights”. 2002. OHCHR.
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/poverty/expert/docs/Thomas_Pogge_Summary.pdf) //TruLe

Human rights would be fully realized, if all human beings had secure access to the objects of these rights. Our world is today very far from this
ideal. Piecing
together the current global record, we find that most of the current massive
underfulfillment of human rights is more or less directly connected to poverty. The connection is direct in the case
of basic social and economic human rights, such as the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s
family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care. The connection is more indirect in the case of civil and political human rights
associated with democratic government and the rule of law. Desperately poor people, often stunted, illiterate, and
heavily preoccupied with the struggle to survive, typically lack effective means for resisting or rewarding
their rulers, who are therefore likely to rule them oppressively while catering to the interests of other,
often foreign, agents (governments and corporations, for instance) who are more capable of
reciprocation. The statistics are appalling. Out of a total of 6575 million human beings, 830 million are reportedly chronically
undernourished, 1100 million lack access to safe water and 2600 million lack access to basic sanitation (UNDP 2006: 174, 33). About 2000
million lack access to essential drugs (www.fic.nih.gov/about/summary.html). Some 1000 million have no adequate shelter and 2000 million
lack electricity (UNDP 1998: 49). Some 799 million adults are illiterate (www.uis.unesco.org). Some 250 million children between 5 and 14 do
wage work outside their household with 170.5 million of them involved in hazardous work and 8.4 million in the “unconditionally worst” forms
of child labor, which involve slavery, forced or bonded labor, forced recruitment for use in armed conflict, forced prostitution or pornography,
or the production or trafficking of illegal drugs (ILO 2002: 9, 11, 17, 18). People
of colour and females (UNDP 2003: 310-330;
UNRISD 2005; Social Watch 2005) bear greatly disproportionate shares of these deprivations. Roughly
one third of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, are due to poverty-related causes, easily
preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, mosquito nets, re-hydration packs, vaccines
and other medicines. This sums up to over 300 million deaths in just the 17 years since the end of the Cold War — many more than
were caused by all the wars, civil wars, and government repression of the entire 20th century. Children under five account for
nearly 60% or 10.6 million of the annual death toll from poverty-related causes (UNICEF 2005: inside
front cover).
 Solvency
Plan text: The United States federal government should guarantee a universal basic
income funded by taxes on companies that automate their workforces. To clarify, the
plan implements a sliding-scale automation tax where a company using an automated
workforce is taxed based on the ratio of human workers to automated workers.
I’m willing to clarify or further specify in CX – gives you stable ground and deters silly
theory debates.
The plan makes automation more efficient, while funding UBI.
Berger 17 (Aaron Berger. Aaron Berger is a research scientist specializing in pattern recognition, domestic and foreign current events, and
technology trends under the lens of existential risk. “Let the robots take our jobs and pay for a universal basic income”. 7-21-2017. Quartz.
https://qz.com/1034358/ubi-and-automation-could-be-the-symbiotic-solution-for-displaced-workers/) //TruLe

Companies that automate their workforces should be taxed on these new massive profits, and some of
the resulting capital given back to workers by the government in the form of UBI. While the idea of a UBI is
popular—Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all championed it—how exactly would a universal basic income be engineered? A
small, yet successful, experiment has conducted in the UK, and Ontario, Canada is also about to experiment with it this year. But how would a
private-sector-funded version work? The profits generated from automation could be used to pay a basic wage to those displaced by robots.
To use the welder example from before, a company could slash the cost of their production by at least a
third in a short period of time, and would continue to see greater profits as efficiencies increase and the
price for parts drops. If that company eventually arrives at the $2 an hour mark that BCG predicts, the
company’s bottom line would have been improved by 1250%. Given all of the savings and massive profits companies are
going to reap from these new technologies, they should be responsible for using part of this monetary kick-back to help the workers they’ve
displaced. Legislators might consider a sliding-scale automation tax, where a company qualifying itself as using an automated workforce would
be taxed depending on how many human workers they have performing tasks compared to how many tasks are performed by automated
workers that a human could rightly do. This money could then be put into a UBI fund that is then distributed by the government to citizens
affected by automation—or to the entire population. At the exponential rate of robotization, there isn’t a lot of time for legislators to figure out
the intricacies of a solution—but they don’t seem to be in too much of a rush. Steven Mnuchin, the US’s treasury secretary, is already
completely ignoring this issue, for example. To understand how crucial it is that legislators get cracking, consider the timeline for the current
mess that is healthcare in America: If it takes this long to debate solutions on something as dire as health insurance, what hope do we have for
the solution to an automated economy? Governments need to act now to stymie potentially disastrous socio-
economic effects in the coming decades. The answer lies in two of the most popular contemporary hot-spot topics in the
modern media landscape: UBI and automation. They could play into each other in a mutually beneficial fashion. Portions of the profits reaped
by robots should be diverted to support this new system as humans inevitably phase out of the workforce.

The plan slows automation growth, giving people time to offset job losses.
Gralla 17 (Preston Gralla. Preston Gralla is a contributing editor for Computerworld, a blogger for ITworld, and the author of more than 45
books, including NOOK Tablet: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly 2012) and How the Internet Works (Que, 2006). “It’s time to tax the robots”. 3-7-
2017. Computer World. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3177426/it-management/it-s-time-to-tax-the-robots.html) //TruLe

Bill Gates has a modest proposal: Tax

robots to slow the growth of automation and fund the kinds of important
jobs our economy ignores, such as caring for children and the elderly . In an interview with the website Quartz, Gates
notes that when a human does $50,000 worth of work, that income is taxed and money goes to the government, but when a robot does the
work, no tax is paid on it. So
he argues that robots need to be taxed to make up for that lost governmental
income — and also to slow down the pace of automation and give society some time to figure out how
to offset the job losses and societal impact caused by robots. He argues: “At a time when people are saying that the
arrival of that robot is a net loss because of displacement, you ought to be willing to raise the tax level and even slow down the speed of that
adoption somewhat to figure out, ‘OK, what about the communities where this has a particularly big impact? Which transition programs have
worked and what type of funding do those require?’ ” Gates is right that robots and automation have led to job losses — drastic ones. Robots,
not cheap overseas labor and foreign trade agreements, have been most responsible for killing factory jobs, according to a report by Ball State
University’s Center for Business and Economic Research. The center found that 88% of factory jobs lost “were taken by robots and other
homegrown factors that reduce factories’ need for human labor.” It’s not just factory jobs that are being taken by robots. The New York Times
reports that while the American oil industry is making a comeback, jobs aren’t following, thanks to robots and automation. Approximately
163,000 oil jobs have been lost since the industry’s peak employment in 2014, about 30% of the total. Thousands of workers have since come
back because of rising oil costs, but the Times reports that experts say between a third and a half of workers aren’t returning because their jobs
have been eliminated through automation. “People have left the industry, and they are not coming back,” Michael Dynan, vice president for
portfolio and strategic development at Schramm, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of drilling rigs, told the newspaper. “If it’s a repetitive task, it
can be automated, and I don’t need someone to do that. I can get a computer to do that.” Eustasio Velazquez, a blue-collar worker who used to
lay cables for the industry, lost his job to automation and can’t find a new one, the newspaper reports. He put his dilemma succinctly: “I don’t
see a future. Pretty soon every rig will have one worker and a robot.” That is just the beginning of the toll that robots and automation will take
on people’s jobs. Research from McKinsey on more than 2,000 work activities for more than 800 occupations found that “currently
demonstrated technologies could automate 45 percent of the activities people are paid to perform and that about 60 percent of all occupations
could see 30 percent or more of their constituent activities automated.” In other words, a robot has your job in its cross hairs. Given all that,
Gates’ robot tax idea makes sense. Money
from it could help retrain workers or fund the important jobs such as
educating children or caring for the elderly that our economy does a poor job of providing. Such a tax,
he goes on to say, can even help the innovation economy by ensuring that it gets the kind of public and
governmental support it needs in order to thrive. He warns, “It is really bad if people overall have more
fear about what innovation is going to do than they have enthusiasm. That means they won’t shape it
for the positive things it can do. And, you know, taxation is certainly a better way to handle it than just banning some elements of
it.” Plenty needs to be hashed out about how to tax robots. What, for example, is a robot? Do software and algorithms by themselves count?
Should simple automation be considered a robot? How much should the tax be? But all those questions can be resolved. Many people think
that Gates’ proposal doesn’t go far enough. They believe that robots will eventually replace so many jobs that the government should provide a
universal basic income to everyone in the country. Elon Musk is a believer, as are many others in Silicon Valley, many liberals, Clinton
administration labor secretary Robert Reich, some libertarians including the Cato Institute, and even some conservatives. We’re far from a time
when robots have replaced so many jobs that the government should give us all a check. But Gates is right — it’s time to tax robots for the
greater good.

UBI grants people the power to reject low-paying, unfavorable jobs in favor of having
valuable work, bolstering economic security.
Guppta 16 (Kavi Guppta. I write about technology and how it impacts workforce transformation. “Basic Income Might Be The Answer To
Society's Productivity Crisis”. 9-22-2016. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kaviguppta/2016/09/22/basic-income-might-be-the-answer-to-
societys-productivity-crisis/#26cb8b3162b3) //TruLe

SS: Basic income isn't the only solution, but it's arguably the best solution because it's the solution that actually does the most. Look at
education for example. It's been shown that increasing the incomes of parents does more for educational outcomes than something like pre-K.
So why spend money on pre-K instead of parental incomes? If the reason kids aren't doing as well in school as they would if their parents just
earned more money to improve household environments, why give money to schools instead of parents? It's the difference between treating
the symptoms and treating the causes. Treating symptoms is wasteful and never ends. Treat the causes. Better yet, vaccinate against diseases
so people don't get sick in the first place. When it comes to work, we as a society have a serious problem with how we look at it. We don't look
at all the work going on that's unpaid as work, even though it's arguably the most important kind of work. Think of care work and volunteering
in our communities and the open-source movement, and even art. All of this work is valuable but unpaid. Meanwhile there are countless jobs
full of work that we arguably shouldn't be doing. Maybe because it's harmful to people or the environment, or because it's work better done by
machines, or perhaps because it's work that actually takes 4 hours instead of 8 but we pretend to be busy when we're not. Meanwhile,
jobs that people don't like doing for the most part pay very little, while more enjoyable jobs pay more,
which is all backwards. But it's the way it is because people must accept jobs if they can't say no to
them. Those facing destitution say yes to working poverty because at least it's better than absolute poverty. Basic income changes
all of this by granting people the power to say no. With the ability to say no to jobs no one wants to do,
those employers must pay more for people to do them, or reduce the hours, or invest in automation .
With the power to say no also comes the ability to say yes. People can choose to do the unpaid work that is arguably
more valuable. They can choose to use their basic incomes as basic venture capital to startup new
businesses, and people with basic incomes can even afford to work at these startups for free in
exchange for something like stock options that will reward them far more down the road if the idea is
successful than a wage would have, because they have the real ability to work for free . Basic income also
changes the entire way we look at the growing gig economy. Right now Uber drivers might only be driving for Uber because they are barely
getting by and need more money to meet their needs. With basic income operating as an income floor, Uber drivers have their basic needs
covered and they are driving because they simply choose to drive for additional money (until a self-driving Uber provides far cheaper rides).
On-demand labor with a basic income means that everyone has both greater ability to earn additional
income and a feeling of economic security. On-demand labor without basic income means growing
insecurity as more and more people try to just scrape by and monthly incomes vary so much that people
are constantly falling behind and ceaselessly living on the edge . And finally basic income changes the automation
discussion from will robots take our jobs to let's give our jobs to robots. I think it's extremely odd that we've developed our technology to the
point it can not only do our muscle work for us, but also a great deal of our mind work, and we're all worried it will do our work for us. That
makes no sense to me. The fact anyone is even worried at all that machines might actually do our jobs for us is a big bright signal that we're
doing something wrong, and what we're doing wrong is that we require employment in order to live. If we break that connection and allow
people to live without employment, then we dissolve our fear of technological unemployment.

UBI empowers workers to re-articulate broader exploitive systems via overturning the
asymmetry of power between labor and capital.
Williams 15 [Nick Srnicek (born 1982) is an American writer and academic. He is currently a lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. Alex Williams is a lecturer in the
sociology department at City, University of London. He is the author of the forthcoming Hegemony Now (Verso 2017, with Jeremy Gilbert) and Inventing the Future. “INVENTING THE FUTURE
Postcapitalism and a World Without Work”. 9781784780968 Inventing the Future (454i) final pass.indd ii 781784780968 Inventing the Future (454i) final pass.indd ii 04/09/2015 14:24:5.
http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/16935/1/SRNICEK%20and%20Williams%20%282015%29%20%27Inventing%20the%20Future%27.pdf. Accessed: 2/22/18]//roman

The fi rst point to emphasise is that the demand for UBI is a demand for a political transformation, not just an economic one. It is often thought that UBI is simply a form of redistribution from
the rich to the poor, or that it is just a measure to maintain economic growth by stimulating consumer demand. From this perspective, UBI would have impeccable reformist credentials and be

the real signifi cance of UBI lies in the way it overturns the asymmetry of
little more than a glorifi ed progressive tax system. Yet

power that currently exists between labour and capital. As we saw in the discussion of surplus populations, the proletariat is defi ned by its
separation from the means of production and subsistence. The proletariat is thereby forced to sell itself in the job market in order to gain the income necessary to survive. The most fortunate

among us have the leisure to choose which job to take, but few of us have the capacity to choose no job. A basic income changes this condition, by giving the
proletariat a means of subsistence without dependency on a job.107 Workers, in other words, have the option to choose whether to take
a job or not (in many ways, taking neoclassical economics at its word, and making work truly voluntary). A UBI therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of

wage labour, partially decommodifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between
labour and capital. This transformation – making work voluntary rather than coerced – has a number of signifi cant consequences. In the first place, it increases
class power by reducing slack in the labour market. Surplus populations show what happens when there are large amounts of slack in the labour
market: wages fall, and employers are free to debase workers .108 By contrast, when the labour market is tight, labour gains the political edge. The

economist Michał Kalecki recognised this long ago when he argued that it explained why full employment would be resisted at every step.109 If every worker were

employed, the threat of being fi red would lose its disciplinary character – there would be more than enough jobs waiting just
outside. Workers would gain the upper hand , and capital would lose its political power . The same dynamic holds for a basic income:
by eliminating the reliance on wage labour, workers gain control over how much labour to supply, giving them signifi cant power in the labour market. Class power is also increased in a variety

of other ways. Strikes are easier to mobilise, since workers no longer have to worry about pay being docked or dwindling
free time spent building communities and
strike funds. The amount of time spent working for a wage can be modifi ed to one’s own desire, with

engaging with politics. One can slow down and reflect, safely protected from the constant pressures of
neoliberalism. The anxieties that surround work and unemployment are reduced with the safety net of a UBI.110 Moreover, the demand for UBI combines
the needs of the employed, the unemployed, the underemployed, migrant labour, temporary workers, students and the disabled.111 It articulates a common

interest between these groups and provides a populist orientation for them to mobilise towards . The
second related feature of UBI is that it transforms precarity and unemployment from a state of
insecurity to a state of voluntary flexibility . It is often forgotten that the initial push for flexible labour came from workers, as a way of demolishing the
constraining permanency of traditional Fordist labour.112 The repetitiveness of a nine-to-fi ve job, combined with the tediousness of most work, is hardly an appealing prospect for a life-long

Marx himself invokes the

career. The demands of care labour often require a flexible approach as well, further undermining the appeal of traditional jobs.

liberating aspects of flexible labour in his famous claim that communism ‘makes it possible for me to do
one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman,
herdsman or critic’.113 In the face of these desires for fl exibility, capital adapted and co-opted them into a new form of exploitation. Today, fl exible labour simply presents
 Third,
itself as precarity and insecurity, rather than freedom. The UBI responds to this generalisation of precarity and transforms it from a state to be feared back into a state of liberation.

a basic income would necessitate a rethinking of the values attributed to different types of work. Given
that workers would no longer be forced to take a job, they could instead simply reject jobs that paid too
little, required too much work, offered too few benefi ts, or were demeaning and undignifi ed. Low-
waged work is often crass and disempowering, and under a programme of UBI it is unlikely that many
would want to undertake it. The result would be that hazardous, boring and unattractive work would have to be better paid, while more rewarding, invigorating and
attractive work would be less well paid. In other words, the nature of work would become a measure of its value, not merely its profi tability. 114 The outcome of this

revaluation would also mean that, as wages for the worst jobs rose, there would be new incentives to
automate them. UBI therefore forms a positive-feedback loop with the demand for full automation . On the
other hand, a basic income would not only transform the value of the worst jobs, but also go some way towards recognising the unpaid labour of most care work. In the same way that the
demand for wages for housework recognised and politicised the domestic labour of women, so too does UBI recognise and politicise the generalised way in which we are all responsible for
reproducing society: from informal to formal work, from domestic to public work, from individual to collective work. What is central is not productive labour, defi ned in either traditional
Marxist or neoclassical terms, but rather the more general category of reproductive labour.115 Given that we all contribute to the production and reproduction of capitalism, our activity

All the
deserves to be remunerated as well.116 In recognising this, the UBI indicates a shift from remuneration based upon ability to remuneration based upon basic need.117

genetic, historical and social variations that make effort a poor measure of a person’s worth are rejected
here, and instead people are valued simply for being people.

A UBI doesn’t disincentivize work – it protects workers from abuse and removes the
valorization of the paid worker
Bickman 17(Jed Bickman is an editor at The New Press, a non-profit book publisher. He is the writer for
The Sprouter, an online magazine discussing politics in the Trump era., 7-15-2017, "What Are We
Worth? Part 5: Counter-counterarguments," Spouter Magazine, https://thespouter.com/what-are-we-
worth-part-5-counter-counterarguments-b284cfb7df9a?gi=17911e17b09a) //SM

*Brackets in Original*
One fear mainstream economists have is that a basic income would create, in the words of Eduardo Porter writing in the New York Times, a “disincentive to work,” especially for the “almost
quarter of American households [who] make less than $25,000 [a year]. It would hardly be surprising if a $10,000 check each for mom and dad sapped their desire to work.” On whose behalf

In the paragraph immediately preceding, he says “ Work…is not

does Porter feel this anxiety? Ostensibly, for mom and dad themselves.

just what people do for a living. It is a source of status. It organizes people’s lives. It offers an
opportunity for progress. None of this can be replaced by a check.” If all this is true, why would the
check create a disincentive to work? Porter’s true fear is my hope: that the threat of economic
desperation will no longer loom over the working poor , and they will be less inclined to let their bosses
abuse and take advantage of them. (Other basic income advocates such as Scott Santens and Andy Stern argue for a basic income exactly because it would shrink
the workforce. They think that technological change will soon eliminate the need for large sectors of the workforce, and they may very well be right. I don’t know whether their predictions will

Of course labor is often gratifying, and even waged and

come true. I don’t disagree with them, but I can’t prove them right, either.)

salaried work is frequently gratifying, especially to privileged middle-class professionals like myself. But
to argue that wage-earning is inherently more dignified and noble than unpaid pursuits ignores the
tremendous suffering that people experience on the job. Take, for instance, the experience of Erika Morales, a night-shift janitor who cleaned
corporate office buildings in California (her case was described by the excellent journalist Bernice Yeung in her expose, Rape on the Night Shift, which is a must-read). Her boss took advantage
of her isolated working conditions to repeatedly harass and even rape her in supply closets. She thought about quitting, but she said, “in that moment…I didn’t have another income for myself
and my two children.” Her abuser was a serial rapist who consciously took advantage of the economic vulnerability of the women workers he oversaw, telling a reporter that “these women”

The bargain of many people’s

were “doing it all for the money.” This representative story, I think, says more about work in America today than any set of statistics.

jobs is trading desperation for exploitation. And yet we almost never hear these stories spoken aloud.
The ideology that even very low-wage and very degrading wage work confers upon laborers some
intangible level of dignity has its roots in the “happy slave” narratives that were used for hundreds of
years to excuse slavery — a foundational trope in American culture. America has clung to the slavery-era
idea that work is an inherent good, but since Blacks are a lazy people, they must be forced to work, for
their own good. This trope has easily been subsumed into the contemporary misconception that people who receive welfare and food stamp benefits are lazy. When Arlie
Hochschild interviewed white Tea Party supporters in Louisiana to understand their political convictions, many of them talked about welfare as something that set them against the idea of
government in general, saying things like, “I think if people refuse to work, we should let them starve,” and “With welfare what it is, it’s not worth it to get a real job,” and that welfare
recipients “lazed around days and partied at night.”[i] All of these people said they were proud of their “hard work” in contrast to these dissolute poor people. Although few of those
interviewed had regular interactions with Black people, this sentiment must be put in the context of the racialized discourse around welfare; studies have shown that news stories about
welfare and negative stories about poverty continue to be illustrated with Black faces. Meanwhile, stories about poor people overcoming hardship to succeed are predominantly about whites
(pdf). Discourse aside, the Black unemployment rate is twice the overall unemployment rate — and for the last seventy years, has always been double, in good economic times and bad (pdf).
The “unemployment rate” is not a measure of who isn’t working; it’s a measure of who is out actively looking for a job but unable to find one — in other words, the people counted by this
statistic are desperately seeking employment but shut out of the economy. This is the result of a confluence of problems: divestment in Black communities’ schools; exclusion from unions and
other worker protections (the unemployment gap between Black and white people emerged as unionization expanded in the mid-20th century), and employer discrimination. Although this

The strong labor movement of the

deep attachment to the ideal of “hard work” is not always so explicitly racist, it always carries its racial history along with it.

20th century has left behind a residue of blue-collar pride that said work is essential to masculine dignity
because it allows a man to achieve “independence.” People who argue from this vantage point typically
have a certain type of work in mind when they wax poetic about the dignity of honest jobs, and it’s not
the service and retail jobs that dominate today’s economy. As historian Adolph Reed, Jr. points out, the unionized manufacturing jobs of the
20th century that everyone is so nostalgic about are most often associated with white men, the latter with women, people of color, and women of color, and thus seen as “degraded.” The
American ideal of “hard work” is not universal — it is raced, and gendered. It only applies to some people doing some kinds of jobs. Further, this notion of work is androcentric, as Almaz Zelleke

This valorization
defines it, taking “men’s dominant life patterns…to represent the norm for all…an assumption of an autonomous, independent worker as the model citizen.“[ii]

of waged work slights unpaid care and domestic work. If such pro-labor advocates do acknowledge the
“crisis of care,” as philosopher Nancy Fraser terms it [iii], they are likely to embrace policies that make
childcare universal in order to allow more women to shed their daytime family responsibilities and
become autonomous, independent workers in this model. Universal childcare is a laudable policy goal in
conjunction with an unconditional basic income, but in the absence of basic income, most mothers are
forced by economic need to go out and work for a wage. Zelleke points out that these policies reinforce
the androcentric idea that individual women can only reach their full potential in the public sphere or in
jobs — i.e. empower women, but only as long as it contributes to the GDP.

Labor is optional under a UBI – allows those who want jobs to get it and incentivizes
growth of automation
Santens 1/15 (Scott Santens, 1-15-2017, "Why we should all have a basic income," World Economic Forum,
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income/) //SM

Simply put, a basic income improves the market for labour by making it optional. The transformation
from a coercive market to a free market means that employers must attract employees with better pay
and more flexible hours. It also means a more productive work force that potentially obviates the need
for market-distorting minimum wage laws. Friction might even be reduced, so that people can move
more easily from job to job, or from job to education/retraining to job, or even from job to
entrepreneur, all thanks to more individual liquidity and the elimination of counter-productive
bureaucracy and conditions. Perhaps best of all, the automation of low-demand jobs becomes further
incentivized through the rising of wages. The work that people refuse to do for less than a machine
would cost to do it becomes a job for machines. And thanks to those replaced workers having a basic
income, they aren’t just left standing in the cold in the job market’s ongoing game of musical chairs.
They are instead better enabled to find new work, paid or unpaid, full-time or part-time, that works best
for them.

Alaska proves employment increases post-UBI

Coren 2/13 (Michael J. Coren. I cover technology, science, startups, and VC, particularly in Silicon Valley. “When you give Alaskans a
universal basic income, they still keep working”. 2-13-2018. Quartz. https://qz.com/1205591/a-universal-basic-income-experiment-in-alaska-
shows-employment-didnt-drop/) //TruLe

A universal basic income (UBI) is at the heart of the debate about how society will organize itself after robots and algorithms do more and more
of today’s work. Not everyone agrees how we do this. One side argues, with some evidence, that giving all citizens a minimum stipend that
covers basic needs discourages punching our time cards. Jobs also give us more than just money, they offer purpose and social cohesion. The
other argues this model has us all wrong: Humans desire meaningful work, and a basic income allows them to pursue it through better
education, time and flexibility that ultimately benefits society. A working paper published this month with the National Bureau of Economic
Research begins to answer these issues with empirical data. Earlier studies analyzing lottery winners and negative tax experiments in the 1970s
found for every 10% increase in unearned income, earned income seemed to fall by about 1%. Those experiments suggested payments created
a slight disincentive to work (although those studies suffered from small sample sizes and short time frames, usually three to five years,
compared to the universal, long-term coverage envisioned in a UBI). The study examining the Alaska Permanent Fund calls this into question.
The $60.1-billion state fund, established in 1976, collects revenue from Alaska’s oil and mineral leases to fund an annual stipend to Alaskans.
Since 1982, the fund has sent a dividend check to every Alaskan resident. In recent years, its been up to $2,072 per person, or $8,288 for a
family of four (it was reduced in 2016 amid a budget crisis). Alaska’s
system set up an ideal experiment. Researchers
from the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania compared residents’ behavior before
and after the dividend to decide what effect the payments had on workforce participation. They found
that full-time employment did not change at all, and the share of Alaskans who worked part-time jobs
increased by 17%. “Given prior findings on the magnitude of the income effect, it is somewhat surprising for an unconditional cash
transfer not to decrease employment,” the paper states. The authors theorize employment remained steady because
the extra income that allowed people to buy more also increased demand for service jobs , a finding
consistent with the economic data of the time . (There was no effect seen when it came to jobs, such as those in
manufacturing, that produce exports.) Essentially, the authors argue, macro-economic effects of higher spending
supported overall employment. The fund has won over skeptical Alaskans. The Economic Security Project (ESP), a group backing
efforts to collect data on unconditional cash stipends, recently commissioned a survey of 1,004 Alaskan voters to see how they felt about the
Alaska Permanent Fund. Public
support for the program has deepened in the past generation, despite the
prospect of raising taxes. Elsewhere, UBI studies are ongoing. After lying dormant for several decades, basic income research has
experienced a resurgence. With advances in artificial intelligence and automation looming, Silicon Valley types, as well as countries such as
Finland, are funding an assortment of pilots and studies. The most recent paper is not the final word: The Alaskan dividends are not a full UBI
(they don’t cover minimal living expenses). Contexts differ from country to country, and within regions of countries. The dozen or so
experiments now being run around the world will soon shed more light on the question.
 Underview
Case outweighs – the state masks violent inequalities with big-stick threats.
Jackson 12. Richard Jackson: I am currently the Deputy Director of the National Peace and Conflict Studies Centre at the University of
Otago, New Zealand. Prior to this, I was Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK. I study and teach on issues of
terrorism, political violence, conflict resolution and war. "The Great Con of National Security,". 8-5-2012. Richardjacksonterrorismblog.
https://richardjacksonterrorismblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/the-great-con-of-national-security/ //RS

It may have once been the case that being attacked by another country was a major threat to the lives of ordinary people. It may also be true
that there are still some pretty serious dangers out there associated with the spread of nuclear weapons. For
the most part,
however, most of what you’ve been told about national security and all the big threats which can
supposedly kill you is one big con designed to distract you from the things that can really hurt you, such
as the poverty, inequality and structural violence of capitalism, global warming, and the manufacture and proliferation
of weapons – among others. The facts are simple and irrefutable: you’re far more likely to die from lack of health care
provision than you are from terrorism; from stress and overwork than Iranian or North Korean nuclear
missiles; from lack of road safety than from illegal immigrants; from mental illness and suicide than from
computer hackers; from domestic violence than from asylum seekers; from the misuse of legal
medicines and alcohol abuse than from international drug lords. And yet, politicians and the servile media spend most
of their time talking about the threats posed by terrorism, immigration, asylum seekers, the international drug trade, the nuclear programmes
of Iran and North Korea, computer hackers, animal rights activism, the threat of China, and a host of other issues which are all about as equally
unlikely to affect the health and well-being of you and your family. Along
with this obsessive and perennial discussion of
so-called ‘national security issues’, the state spends truly vast sums on security measures which have
virtually no impact on the actual risk of dying from these threats, and then engages in massive displays
of ‘security theatre’ designed to show just how seriously the state takes these threats – such as the x-ray
machines and security measures in every public building, surveillance cameras everywhere, missile launchers in urban areas, drones in
Afghanistan, armed police in airports, and a thousand other things. This display is meant to convince you that these threats are really, really
serious. And while all this is going on, the
rulers of society are hoping that you won’t notice that increasing social
and economic inequality in society leads to increased ill health for a growing underclass ; that suicide and crime
always rise when unemployment rises; that workplaces remain highly dangerous and kill and maim hundreds of people per year; that there are
preventable diseases which plague the poorer sections of society; that domestic violence kills and injures thousands of women and children
annually; and that globally, poverty and preventable disease kills tens of millions of people needlessly every year. In other words, they are
hoping that you won’t notice how much structural violence there is in the world. More than this, they are hoping that you won’t notice that
while literally trillionsof dollars are spent on military weapons, foreign wars and security theatre (which also
arguably do nothing to make any us any safer, and may even make us marginally less safe), that
domestic violence programmes struggle to provide even minimal support for women and children at risk of
serious harm from their partners; that underfunded mental health programmes mean long waiting lists to receive
basic care for at-risk individuals; that drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes lack the funding to match the demand for help;
that welfare measures aimed at reducing inequality have been inadequate for decades; that health and safety measures at many workplaces
remain insufficiently resourced; and that measures to tackle global warming and developing alternative energy remain hopelessly inadequate.
Of course, none of this is surprising. Politicians are a part of the system; they don’t want to change it.
For them, all the insecurity, death and ill-health caused by capitalist inequality are a price worth paying
to keep the basic social structures as they are. A more egalitarian society based on equality, solidarity,
and other non-materialist values would not suit their interests, or the special interests of the lobby
groups they are indebted to. It is also true that dealing with economic and social inequality, improving public
health, changing international structures of inequality, restructuring the military-industrial complex, and
making the necessary economic and political changes to deal with global warming will be extremely difficult and will require
long-term commitment and determination. For politicians looking towards the next election, it is clearly
much easier to paint immigrants as a threat to social order or pontificate about the ongoing danger of
terrorists. It is also more exciting for the media than stories about how poor people and people of colour
are discriminated against and suffer worse health as a consequence. Viewed from this vantage point, national
security is one massive confidence trick – misdirection on an epic scale. Its primary function is to distract
you from the structures and inequalities in society which are the real threat to the health and wellbeing
of you and your family, and to convince you to be permanently afraid so that you will acquiesce to all
the security measures which keep you under state control and keep the military-industrial complex
ticking along. Keep this in mind next time you hear a politician talking about the threat of uncontrolled immigration, the risk posed by
asylum seekers or the threat of Iran, or the need to expand counter-terrorism powers. The question is: when politicians are talking about
national security, what is that they don’t want you to think and talk about? What exactly is the misdirection they are engaged in? The truth is, if
you think that terrorists or immigrants or asylum seekers or Iran are a greater threat to your safety than the capitalist system, you have been
well and truly conned, my friend. Don’t believe the hype: you’re much more likely to die from any one of several forms of structural violence in
society than you are from immigrants or terrorism. Somehow, we need to challenge the politicians on this fact.

Using the state as a heuristic means we defend the state without being statist. It
won’t inculcate dominant norms and is key to their movement working.