by Kate McFarland | Apr 8, 2017 | Research
Matthew Dimick, Associate Professor of Law at University at Buffalo, has written a new article for the Indiana Law Review in which he compares the promises of basic income to those of working-time regulation, presenting a case to prefer the latter.
According to Dimick, the potential benefits of working-time regulation outweigh those of basic income, in large part because they would be shared more equitably throughout the population. For example, on Dimick’s assessment, a basic income would not allow the majority of people to increase their leisure time (a benefit he sees as largely confined those who “earn subsistence-level incomes or lower” and thus “would have either the option not to work or the bargaining power to secure a more favorable work-leisure trade-off with employers”); working-time regulation, in contrast, would increase leisure time for middle- and even upper-class workers as well. Additionally, Dimick argues that working-time regulation could allow not only leisure but also jobs to be more widely available and equitably distributed — whereas a basic income would deepen the divide between the working and non-working populations.
And working-time regulation might have other positive effects. For instance, due to the across-the-board increase in leisure time, Dimick contends that the policy would likely result in decreased consumption, while a basic income might spur additional consumption — leading to a preference for the former from an ecological viewpoint.
Further, because working-time regulation is a less radical departure from current policies — and, in particular, does not aim to sever benefits from work — it is much better positioned to gain popular and political support.
Dimick notes that basic income might do more than working-time regulation alone to “transform the workplace” (e.g. by giving more bargaining power to employees themselves) but that, with respect to this goal, working-time regulation should be conceived as part of a larger set of legislative reforms.
Matthew Dimick’s current areas of research include labor and employment law, tax and welfare policies, and income inequality. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied organized labor under Erik Olin Wright and Ivan Ermakoff, and a JD from Cornell Law School.
Matthew Dimick, 2017, “Better Than Basic Income? Liberty, Equality, and the Regulation of Working Time,” Indiana Law Review.
Post reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 Laurence Edmondson
by Andrew Sisk | Mar 14, 2017 | News
Retired judge and 2012 Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate Jim Gray proposes in his blog 2 Paragraphs 4 Liberty to replace “things like welfare, minimum wages, etc.” with a monthly stipend for those with no income, similar to a Universal Basic Income, except in Gray’s plan, the stipend would be would gradually withdraw as individual income increased.
He also encourages the implementation of a “graduated flat tax” that would cap out at 25% in the highest tax bracket and eliminate all income tax deductions, suggesting that replacing the current tax system with his proposal would provide the funding source needed for the monthly stipend.
See the full article:
Jim Gray, “Liberty Can Create A Safety Net” (February 28, 2017)
by Citizens' Income Trust | Aug 2, 2015 | Opinion
Peter Barnes, With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to save our middle class when jobs don’t pay enough, Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2014, 1 62656 214 1, pbk, xii + 174 pp, £13.99
There are not enough well-paid jobs to sustain a large middle class, and Peter Barnes offers as a solution to this problem the idea that co-owned wealth could pay dividends to everyone. The Alaska Permanent Fund is the model, and the inspiration is Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice, in which Paine proposes an equal distribution of the income generated by the property which belongs to all of us. This is the ‘co-owned property’ that is at the heart of Barnes’ proposal; and he extends the meaning of the economist’s term ‘rent’ to include payments made to all of us in recognition of the uses that are made of our co-owned wealth.
Drivers of the changed outlook for the United States’ middle class – and the middle classes of all developed nations – are globalization, automation, and deunionization. The effect of all three of these is to reduce the proportion of the proceeds of production going to labour, and to increase the proportion going to the owners of capital ( – the main point made by Thomas Piketty in his book Capital). Economic stimulus, education, and job creation, might ameliorate the situation slightly in the short term, but automation, globalization and deunionization will defeat them in the end, as will the fact that the economic system quickly magnifies small differences in wealth into sizeable inequalities. As Barnes suggests, the system needs to be fixed, not the symptoms. One particular change that is required is that means-tested benefits need to be replaced by universal ones, but the most important change is that the rent that owners extract from assets that belong to all of us (‘extracted rent’) should be distributed to everyone (‘recycled rent’) as a Citizen’s Income
Barnes suggests several types of co-owned wealth that could be made to generate the income to pay for a Citizen’s Income: the money infrastructure, the electromagnetic spectrum, sovereign wealth funds generated by extraction royalties (as in Alaska and Norway), and the atmosphere ( – rather than ‘cap and trade’, Barnes recommends ‘cap and dividend’, in which anyone who pollutes the atmosphere has to pay, and in which what they pay is redistributed as Citizen’s Incomes).
This is a very American book, and the context in view is always the USA. For Barnes, it is the middle class that needs to be cared for, and, by implication, not the rest. The situation looks very different in the UK. Here we have a generally more egalitarian society ( – compare the universal NHS with the United States’ differentiated health systems), and the ways in which a Citizen’s Income would benefit everyone will be higher up the UK’s agenda than would be the protection of the middle class. But having said that, this is an engaging introduction to a Citizen’s Income and to how we might pay for it. Something similar for the UK and for other European countries would be welcome.
by Josh Martin | Apr 5, 2015 | News
Oestereich reviews Peter Barnes recent book With Liberty and Dividends For All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough and is able to interview Barnes in this article. Barnes’s main idea is to promote equal income from common wealth, leading to many policy ideas similar to a basic income.
Chris Oestereich, “With Liberty and Dividends for All: An interview with Peter Barnes”, Linear to Circular, November 2014.
by Scott Santens | Nov 1, 2014 | Research
In this article, Scott Santens evaluates the American ideals of freedom, liberty, and democracy and the degrees to which they each exist in America today, concluding that a basic income guarantee would best enable these ideals to flourish in actual practice.
Scott Santens, “It’s Time We Take a Closer Look at America’s Three Favorite Words: Freedom, Liberty, and Democracy“, Medium, 28 October 2014.
