Philippe Van Parijs
In a recent article for Social Europe, Philippe van Parijs — philosopher, social scientist, and co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network — urges social democrats to (re-)introduce the basic income as part of their agenda.
Along the way, he addresses several popular misunderstandings that have tended to make those on the left wary of the idea of providing all adults with cash benefits, irrespective of income and employment status:
“Is it not absurd to pay a basic income to the rich?” Van Parijs explains why it is not.
“It is acceptable to replace the right to a job by a right to an income?” Van Parijs explains that, in fact, a basic income functions like a “flexible, intelligent form of job sharing,” not undermining the job culture but improving it.
“Does a basic income threaten the existence of the welfare state?” Again, van Parijs argues that a basic income does nothing of the sort.
In his conclusion, van Parijs enjoins social democrats to recognize that the “bulk of our real income is not the fruit of the efforts of today’s workers…but a gift from nature increasingly combined with capital accumulation, technological innovation and institutional improvements inherited from the past. … In a truly ‘socialist’ perspective, those entitled to this gift are all members of society equally, male and female, irrespective of the extent of their participation in well-protected full-time employment.”
Indeed, despite the recent explosion of interest in basic income, many on the left continue to ignore or dismiss the idea — devoting much more attention to raising wages or creating more jobs. In these regions of politics, van Parijs’s short but compelling article demands careful attention.
Philippe van Parijs, 11 April 2016, “Basic Income And Social Democracy,” Social Europe.
What about the idea of providing compensation for value provided? Without each participant in a system providing value, there is a huge disconnect in distribution of value between parties. In the Basic Income model, the recipients are not providing a value. The entities that are automating their processes are capturing value (savings) and rightfully own this value to decide where they engage this resource (time/monetary, etc.). The only way this could work is for the government to claim this additional value and then distribute it to the populace. This taking would then cause the entities that have automation opportunities to not take advantage due to the lack of incentive as they will not enjoy the benefits of their work.
They would have the incentive of profit, but that profit would simply be taxed. With more economically liberated people given the freedom to innovate and take risks, there would likely be MORE people, not fewer, investing in new enterprise (as evidenced in UBI studies thus far).
Until you raise income to a sufficient level above the cost of living, fewer people are incentivised to risk their capital through innovation. This in turn leads to less perfect market competition and thus less efficiency of production.
Basic income is the way to help not only the unfortunate losers of the capitalist game, but also increase the success of the game itself.