The latest podcast from writer and activist Mia Birdsong and The Nation explores how a Guaranteed Income might actually transform people’s lives.
Mia Birdsong first heard about the concept of Guaranteed Income in the mid-90s through the 1967 writings of Martin Luther King Jr. King. He asserted that “the time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty” by providing a basic level of material well-being to allow all Americans to truly flourish. Birdsong thought it sounded “absurd.” As Birdsong notes, “Free money went against everything I’d learned about being a respectable citizen. But people change and our ideas evolve. I no longer think guaranteed income is absurd.”
After years of political education and activism, Birdsong came to reject some ideas that most of us believe: that having a job makes you a whole person and one has to earn their deservedness.
From The Nation, More Than Enough is a four-episode podcast…
