R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Guaranteed income schemes can take various forms, but in the simplist the government sends every citizen an annual check in an amount sufficient to keep the worlf from the door when misfortune strikes, but not large enough to satisfy anyone's idea of a good life.

As free-market champion Friedrich Hayek saw it, guarenteeing everyone a subsistance income was the moral precondition for opposing broader socialist schemes to equalize income. For Milton Fried, it was an opportunity to eleminate expensive layers of government bureaucracy.

Though mothers and fathers give us life, it is money alone which preserves it.

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working ... Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff-it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

I think my attitude has always been to put food on the table.

In the past, if I didn't work, I didn't eat but now I feel I can not work and I won't starve.

There's a big difference between wanting to work and having to work. And I had to learn that the hard way. Now money is very important to me, because I ain't got it.

If food were free, why work?

I have no ambitions beyond being comfortable in what I do for a living - and earning a living.

There is no freedom without groceries. There are no groceries without freedom. What people call 'capitalism' and 'socialism' are actually one and inseparable. It's a virtuous circle.

Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

... black women ... are trained from childhood to become workers, and expect to be financially self-supporting for most of their lives. They know they will have to work, whether they are married or single; work to them, unlike to white women, is not a liberating goal, but rather an imposed lifelong necessity.

We believe that the federal government is responsible to give every man employment or a guaranteed income.

Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

Abolish Poverty

How will we deal with a world where leisure is abundant and there aren't enough good-paying jobs to go around? To meet this political and economic meta-challenge, the hot new idea is the universal basic income — using some of the wealth generated by all this new technology to guarantee everyone a baseline income, whether they are working or not.

There is the freedom from want, despair and psychological insecurity that would come from having income sufficient to provide the necessities of life. But there is also the freedom to choose not to work for a time in order to take care of family members, pursue a passion, acquire education or contribute to a worthwhile community project. There is the freedom to start a new business with an uncertain future, the freedom to say yes to a job that pays little but yields joy and satisfaction — and the freedom to say no to a job that pays too little or is demeaning and unpleasant. Why, they ask, should such freedoms be reserved only for the wealthy?

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

The primary value of a basic income would be its emancipatory effect.

The most important thing is guaranteed livable income, which will take a while to bring in because it means all the provinces have to participate.

I know that there are many excellent arguments for a universal form of basic income. Since everyone would get it, it would remove the stigma that dogs recipients of assistance and 'entitlements'.

The reason I do television is because we all have to work and earn a living, as I have four children. It's also a platform for me to share my knowledge and inspire the young.

Every American has a right to food, housing, and health care - and we can afford to provide it if billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share.

A universal cash transfer in the form of a minimum guaranteed income would mean that automatically everyone has something to fall back on without having to deal with the vagaries of their local panchayat.