Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his
book in 1967,
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: The Guaranteed Income."
He also wrote about the moral responsibility of eradicating poverty:
"The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.
If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent.
We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age.
It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them.
The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."
Alaska took about a decade to implement this idea, partially. Martin advocates a guaranteed income close to the median income level.
Countries that are resource rich have a moral and ethical responsibility to eradicate poverty among their citizens. The resources need not be natural resources.
For example, while Singapore is famous for its lack of natural resources such as oil or diamond, it is nevertheless a very
resource rich country. It has enough resources to distribute a citizen income of
$9,000 to every citizen annually. The Singapore governing party has a moral and ethical responsibility to eradicate poverty, doing it the simplest and most effective way advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr.
Return to citizens their rightful citizen income.
