iftttwall

I’ve
complained here before about the ways the argument over a
universal basic income often ignores basic-income-style policies
that actually exist in the world. The
last time I said this, I was pointing to the dividend checks
that the state of Alaska distributes to its citizens. Here’s
another example: Of the nearly 240 tribes that run gambling
operations, the AP reports
that “half distribute a regular per-capita payout to their
members.”

Supporters of basic income grants will be happy to hear that
such payouts have
been a real help for low-income Indians. They might be a bit
shaken by another apparent effect of the policy. From that AP
story:

Mia
Prickett’s ancestor was a leader of the Cascade Indians along the
Columbia River and was one of the chiefs who signed an 1855 treaty
that helped establish the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde in
Oregon.

But the Grand Ronde now wants to disenroll Prickett and 79
relatives, and possibly hundreds of other tribal members, because
they no longer satisfy new enrollment requirements.

Prickett’s family is fighting the effort, part of what some experts
have dubbed the “disenrollment epidemic” — a rising number of
dramatic clashes over tribal belonging that are sweeping through
more than a dozen states, from California to Michigan….

[I]n Michigan, where Saginaw Chippewa membership grew once the
tribe started giving out yearly per-capita casino payments that
peaked at $100,000, a recent decline in gambling profits led to
disenrollment battles targeting hundreds.

The Grand Ronde, which runs Oregon’s most profitable Indian
gambling operation, also saw a membership boost after the casino
was built in 1995, from about 3,400 members to more than 5,000
today. The tribe has since tightened membership requirements twice,
and annual per-capita payments decreased from about $5,000 to just
over $3,000.

The article notes that the “tribes deny money is a factor in
disenrollment and say they’re simply trying to strengthen the
integrity of their membership.” And there’s certainly some
truth to that: Not all of these battles have taken place within
tribes that issue payouts to their members. But it’s easy to see
that reducing a tribe’s membership rolls means more money for the
people left over, and it’s hard not to notice that this wave of
battles began just as casino wealth started taking off in the
1990s.

The fact that a citizens’
dividend can encourage conflicts over citizenship seems
significant. So is the question of why such disputes would emerge
in some places but not in others. And moving past that one
issue, I’m sure the casino profit-sharing experience is full of
relevant lessons that hardly anyone’s aware of because hardly
anyone’s bothered to look at it with this topic in mind. People
need to stop thinking of the basic income as just a what-if
exercise or a policy debate from the past. It’s a living experiment
producing data as we speak.

I’ve
complained here before about the ways the argument over a
universal basic income often ignores basic-income-style policies
that actually exist in the world. The
last time I said this, I was pointing to the dividend checks
that the state of Alaska distributes to its citizens. Here’s
another example: Of the nearly 240 tribes that run gambling
operations, the AP reports
that “half distribute a regular per-capita payout to their
members.”

Supporters of basic income grants will be happy to hear that
such payouts have
been a real help for low-income Indians. They might be a bit
shaken by another apparent effect of the policy. From that AP
story:

Mia
Prickett’s ancestor was a leader of the Cascade Indians along the
Columbia River and was one of the chiefs who signed an 1855 treaty
that helped establish the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde in
Oregon.

But the Grand Ronde now wants to disenroll Prickett and 79
relatives, and possibly hundreds of other tribal members, because
they no longer satisfy new enrollment requirements.

Prickett’s family is fighting the effort, part of what some experts
have dubbed the “disenrollment epidemic” — a rising number of
dramatic clashes over tribal belonging that are sweeping through
more than a dozen states, from California to Michigan….

[I]n Michigan, where Saginaw Chippewa membership grew once the
tribe started giving out yearly per-capita casino payments that
peaked at $100,000, a recent decline in gambling profits led to
disenrollment battles targeting hundreds.

The Grand Ronde, which runs Oregon’s most profitable Indian
gambling operation, also saw a membership boost after the casino
was built in 1995, from about 3,400 members to more than 5,000
today. The tribe has since tightened membership requirements twice,
and annual per-capita payments decreased from about $5,000 to just
over $3,000.

The article notes that the “tribes deny money is a factor in
disenrollment and say they’re simply trying to strengthen the
integrity of their membership.” And there’s certainly some
truth to that: Not all of these battles have taken place within
tribes that issue payouts to their members. But it’s easy to see
that reducing a tribe’s membership rolls means more money for the
people left over, and it’s hard not to notice that this wave of
battles began just as casino wealth started taking off in the
1990s.

The fact that a citizens’
dividend can encourage conflicts over citizenship seems
significant. So is the question of why such disputes would emerge
in some places but not in others. And moving past that one
issue, I’m sure the casino profit-sharing experience is full of
relevant lessons that hardly anyone’s aware of because hardly
anyone’s bothered to look at it with this topic in mind. People
need to stop thinking of the basic income as just a what-if
exercise or a policy debate from the past. It’s a living experiment
producing data as we speak.

During the Super Bowl, Bob Dylan’s
“buy American” ad for Chrysler provoked outrage from fans and
critics alike. Nick Gillespie explains that the man behind “Like a
Rolling Stone” is just doing what comes naturally:

Dylan is an artist that purposefully makes his fans
uncomfortable, not out of anger or contempt for his audience, but
out of an undiminished sense of adventure, exploration, and
creativity. In this, Dylan is the polar opposite of the recently
deceased and Pete Seeger, who famously wanted to cut Dylan’s
electricity at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and never, ever
discomfited his fans (or the Comintern, for that matter) for a
second. Where so many writers, filmmakers, artists simply repeat
themselves or flatter their audience’s sense of itself, Dylan is,
after all these years, “still on the road/Heading for another
joint.”

View this article.

During the Super Bowl, Bob Dylan’s
“buy American” ad for Chrysler provoked outrage from fans and
critics alike. Nick Gillespie explains that the man behind “Like a
Rolling Stone” is just doing what comes naturally:

Dylan is an artist that purposefully makes his fans
uncomfortable, not out of anger or contempt for his audience, but
out of an undiminished sense of adventure, exploration, and
creativity. In this, Dylan is the polar opposite of the recently
deceased and Pete Seeger, who famously wanted to cut Dylan’s
electricity at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and never, ever
discomfited his fans (or the Comintern, for that matter) for a
second. Where so many writers, filmmakers, artists simply repeat
themselves or flatter their audience’s sense of itself, Dylan is,
after all these years, “still on the road/Heading for another
joint.”

View this article.

Americans and much of the rest of the world have
been safely and healthfully eating foods made from ingredients
derived from modern biotech corn and soybean varieties for more
than a decade. An
insightful op-ed in today’s New York Times argues that
it is way past time for researchers to develop and farmers to plant
enhanced biotech wheat varieties. Like corn and soy, genetically
enhanced wheat would resist insects and herbicides. As Oklahoma
State University agricultural economist Jayson Lusk and physician
Henry Miller of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution point
out:

Today, it’s easy to see why corn and soybean farmers made the
switch. Crop yields have increased and farmers have been able to
reduce their use of chemical insecticides and shift to less toxic
herbicides to control weeds. They’ve also made more money. Over the
same period, the amount of land planted in wheat has dropped by
about 20 percent, and although yields have increased, productivity
growth has been lower than for the crops genetically engineered
with molecular techniques….

The scientific consensus is that existing genetically engineered
crops are as safe as the non-genetically engineered hybrid plants
that are a mainstay of our diet. The government should be
encouraging and promoting these technologies.

Besides endowing wheat with now-standard enhancements,
researchers can also add drought resistance characteristics. For
example, Egyptian researchers reported ten years ago that they had

dramatically increased drought resistance in wheat by adding a
specific gene from barley to wheat:

The researchers, at Cairo’s Agricultural Genetic Engineering
Research Institute (AGERI), say their technique reduces the number
of irrigations needed from eight to one, and that the wheat could
be cultivated with rainfall alone in some desert areas.

The Times op-ed concludes:

Given the importance of wheat and the confluence of tightening
water supplies, drought, a growing world population and competition
from other crops, we need to regain the lost momentum. To do that,
we need to acquire more technological ingenuity and to end
unscientific, excessive and discriminatory government
regulation.

Yes indeed.

For more background, see my article, “The
Top 5 Lies About Biotech Crops.”