Al Jazeera invited me to participate in a panel discussion (on of all things) U.S. foreign policy. It didn’t give me the chance to talk about basic income or about “indepentarianism” specifically, but I think I made some good points. I said the campaign donors aren’t trying to get candidates elected, but to buy influence. I wish I’d said that this fact makes campaign contributions a form of legalized bribery. I said that when Trump says “America First,” he really means “Me First,” and that most of his foreign policy is to find some leader he can bully to make himself look like a tough guy. I wished I’d said that like he strokes White American’s egos, but delivers for himself not for them—much like most nationalist leaders around the world today and throughout history. I said that America is still acting like it’s 1945 when America was the only in-tact industrial economy. It’s overplaying its influence trying to impose unilateral sanctions on Iran and other places, and overplaying its hand like this will ultimately weaken not strengthen American influence in the world.
Next time I hope they put me on a panel where I can bring up basic income.
My latest discussion paper is a draft of Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book, the Prehistory of Private Property (coauthored by Grant McCall, Tulane University and the Center for Human-Environmental Research) The paper addresses the natural-rights-based (“right-libertarian” or more descriptively “propertarian”) justification of private property to show that it is not a purely normative argument. The paper argues that propertarian principles cannot rule out government or collective ownership of territory on a purely normative, a priori basis, and therefore, cannot rule out the government’s right to tax, regulate, or redistribute property titles without relying on empirical historical claims. Therefore, the natural-rights-based justification of extensive ethical limits on those powers has to stand on the empirical claim that such an event, though possible, is historically implausible—a claim or a collection of claims we call “the classically liberal hypothesis.”
This hypothesis could be specified in at least three different ways. First, before governments or any other collective institutions appear, all or most resources are appropriated by individuals acting as individuals to established private property rights. Second, only individuals acting as individuals perform appropriative acts (i.e. neither individuals acting as monarchs nor groups intending to establish collective, public, or government-held property rights perform appropriative acts). Third, even if collectives perform appropriative acts, subsequent transfers of titles (in the absence of rights violations) are likely only to produce privatized property rights.
This chapter sets up the next two. Chapter 3 examines the evidence propertarians have put forward to support the classically liberal hypothesis, showing that this evidence is extremely weak. Chapter 4 investigates the truth-value of the hypothesis. It not only gives a strong argument for the falsity of the hypothesis; it presents strong evidence indicating that quite the opposite is true. Individualistic private property rights—largely or entirely free of collective control—tend only to be established through aggressive rights violations.
NOTE to Basic Income supporters: although this paper and this book are not directly about Basic Income, they address an argument commonly used to oppose Basic Income.
“The devil’s in the details” is a common saying about policy proposals. Perhaps we need a similar saying for policy research, something like “the devil’s in the caveats.” I say this both because nonspecialists (the citizens and policymakers who are ultimately responsible for evaluating policy in any democracy) have great difficulty understanding what research implies about policy and because specialists often have difficulty understanding what citizens and policymakers most hope to learn from policy research.
This problem creates great difficulty for Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments which are now getting underway in several countries. These experiments can add a small part to the existing body of evidence people need to fully evaluate UBI as a policy proposal. Specialists can provide caveats about the limits of what research implies, but nonspecialists are often unable to translate caveats into a firm grasp of what that research does and does not imply about the policy at issue. Therefore, even the best scientific policy research can leave nonspecialists with an oversimplified, or simply wrong, impression of its implications for policy.
This short book discusses the difficulty of conducting UBI experiments and communicating their results to nonspecialists given both the inherent limits of experimental techniques, the complexity of the public discussion of UBI, and the many barriers that make it difficult for specialists and nonspecialists to understand each other. This book is an effort to help bridge those gaps in understanding with suggestions in an effort to help researchers conduct better experiments and communicate their results in ways more likely to improve public understanding of the possible effects of UBI.
This essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in November 2007.
Public awareness of BIG took a small step forward this summer when the Simpsons Movie made a joke about it. Homer and his family are greeted at the Alaskan border by an official who says, “Welcome to Alaska. Here are a thousand dollars. We pay everyone in Alaska to let us destroy the environment.” It’s not the most flattering joke, but it makes a fair point about the oil-based dividend. Although taxes on the extraction of fossil fuels might be a good way to give firms an incentive not to over-exploit them, and although a BIG might be a good thing to do with those revenues for many reasons, a resource-linked BIG might make people more willing to accept environmentally damaging resource exploitation—thus partially counter-acting the exploitation-discouraging effects of the taxes. This is underlying moral behind the Simpsons’ joke, but it was funnier when they said it.
12.5% of state oil taxes go into the APF, which is invested in stocks and bonds. A portion of the returns on the fund is distributed to Alaskans each year. Of course, the Alaskan government does not pay people when they arrive in the state; Individuals must be residents in the state for a full year to be eligible for to receive dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF). But this is fairly within the confines of the writers’ license for a cartoon.
In one way the cartoon significantly understates the generosity of the APF Dividend. The APF gives the same dividend to every man, woman, and child in the state. Because of recent increases in the stock market to nearly 40 billion dollars, the principal of the APF grew by more than 17.1% for the fiscal year, according to Scripps Howard News Service. Because of this and recent years’ gains, the APF Dividend went up significantly again this year. APF checks this October and November were for $1,654, according to the Juneau Empire. The Simpsons arrived in Alaska with a family of five, and so the border guard could well have said, “Welcome to Alaska. Here’s $8,270.” In other words, the actual figure is eight times more generous the figure mentioned in the movie.
According to the Associated Press, “for many residents, the check is no joke. It means getting caught up on bills and supplementing the income that for some is a week-to-week living in Alaska, where the cost of living is high in part because of its distance from shipping centers in the Lower 48 states.” People who have lived in Alaska since the first Dividends went out in 1982 have received a lifetime total of $27,536 in APF Dividends.
It is doubtful that mention in the Simpsons Movie will spark a campaign for a National Permanent Fund based on resource use throughout the United States. However, Albertans have been eyeing the APF with envy for years. Alberta is a Canadian Province a few hundred miles southeast of Alaska. Alberta has also had large oil revenues, but it lacks a mechanism like the APF to ensure that all Albertans benefit from them.
Allan A. Warrack, of the University of Alberta, writing in The Edmonton Journal on October 15, 2007, called for an Alaska-style dividend for Alberta. The province has a fund based on oil revenues, called the Heritage Fund, which was set up for similar reasons as the APF—to smooth out the province’s gains from the boom-and-bust oil industry. But there is one important difference. The Heritage Fund pays no dividends to individuals. Its earning go solely into the province’s general revenues. According to Warrack, this fact has caused Albertans to take much less interest in their fund than Alaskans. Much less has been invested in the Heritage Fund than in the APF, and Warrack argues, it has been less well managed. Warrack writes, “For about a quarter-century, the Alberta Heritage Fund was static in nominal value, [and] fell in purchasing power due to inflation.” The APF has steadily increased in both real and nominal value.
Warrack mentions that Alberta actually had a social dividend in the 1930s, under the government of the Social Credit party. Although it was short-lived, the dividend was popular. Alberta tried it again with a one-time payment in 2005. Warrack writes, “Some right-leaning citizens viewed the government cash payments favorably because it meant there would be ‘less for the government to waste.’ Some left-leaning citizens favored the payments on grounds of social equity—equal payment amounts meant the needy would get the same amount as the rich, though the value to the needy would be much higher. Still, others said: ‘Just gimme the dough!’” Perhaps someday the joke will be, “Welcome to Alberta. Here are 10,000 Canadian Dollars, eh?”
But even as Albertans envy the Alaska Dividend, Alaska lawmakers are coming under increasing pressure to divert dividend funds into general state spending. Each U.S. state receives a significant amount of funding from the U.S. Federal government based partly on the perceived needs of the state. According to Hal Spence, writing for the Peninsula Clarion and Morris News Service-Alaska, Federal lawmakers are reluctant to give money to the Alaska, when they perceive that it can afford to give large amounts of money away to residents each year. Spence believes this pressure will grow as the APF increases.
Warrack’s editorial can be found online at https://www.cwf.ca/V2/cnt/commentaries_200710120811.php.
Information on the APF can be found online at: https://apfc.org/
Hal Spence’s story is online at:
https://www.alaskajournal.com/stories/081907/hom_20070819001.shtml
And he can be reached at hspence@ptialaska.net.
This blog was originally published at the USBIG NewsFlash in January 2001. It’s a good example of the way Basic Income was treated by major media outlets before the recent wave of support took off.
On Saturday, December 9th, just after the ruling Liberal Party won a
decisive victory in the Canadian Parliamentary election, the basic income
guarantee suddenly and surprisingly appeared on the front pages of
Canadian Newspapers. Under a banner headline, the National Post (one of
the most conservative national dailies in Canada) reported that Prime
Minister "Jean Chretien assembled a top-level committee in hopes of
creating a cradle-to-grave guaranteed annual income program that he hopes
will be his political legacy. This news was very exciting to basic income
supporters because the Liberal Party has the strength in Parliament to
pass any such proposal even over the objections of all the other major
parties. Several in the Post articles over three days claimed that
high-level sources had confirmed that the government was looking into the
idea, but one could easily miss the disclaimer in the first article
saying, "The prime minister's office refused comment and refused to
confirm the existence of the special committee."
Although readers of the USBIG newsletter last April will remember that
Anthony Westell, of the Globe and Mail called for the Liberals to take up
Basic Income as an issue for the coming campaign, the Liberals ignored the
call and the issue was not discussed before the election. It was
surprising that the issue would then be brought up shortly after the
afterword, but a guaranteed income would help the Liberals fulfill
promises made during the campaign to use half of Canada's federal budget
surplus to restore funding to social programs and to attack child poverty.
Chretien was quoted as saying, "The fact is that our prosperity is not
shared by all. … As a Liberal, I believe that the government has the
responsibility to promote social justice." Such as speech would be
shocking in the United States, because he used the phrase, "As a Liberal."
Over the following four days, the National Post followed with more
front-page articles including one with the headline, "Foes slam
'Socialistic Experiment.'" All of the other major parties managed to say
something negative about either the idea or the timing of the action. The
Conservative Party leader criticized both the timing and the idea although
his party seriously looked into an income guarantee in the 1970s. A
prominent member of the liberal NDP slammed the timing of the proposal
saying, "It makes a farce of our democratic system." Then, surprisingly,
he went on to say that the NDP supports it in principle and he bragged
that the NDP had pushed the Liberals to endorse the idea back in the
1960s. Similarly, a member the Quebec separatist party criticized the
timing and said that income support is a matter of provincial
jurisdiction, but did say that the idea was worth further study. The
harshest criticism came from Stockwell Day, the leader of Canada's
Alliance Party, which is known for being
more-conservative-than-the-Conservative Party. He accused the Liberals of
misleading the Canadians during the election and said that Chretien should
name a mountain after himself if he wants to leave a lasting legacy rather
than spend billions to fund a cradle-to-grave welfare program. Such harsh
criticism is surprising coming from the leader of the Alliance party
because the Reform Party (as Mr. Day's party was known before it
restructured two years ago) endorsed the guaranteed income in its election
platform in 1993 as a way to streamline Canada's convoluted
income-security programs.
On December 13th, the basic income guarantee disappeared from Canadian
front pages as quickly it had appeared, when the Globe and Mail reported
in a small article on page 12 that Chretien denied any part in suggesting
the idea. Chretien said, "I don't know where that idea comes from. I
haven't said a word about it." While he was at it, he also denied any
desire to do anything to ensure that he has a lasting political legacy.
Apparently what we witnessed was a trial balloon that was quickly shot
down. Still, there is apparently a high level committee looking into how
to fulfill the Liberals promise to use half of the budget surplus to fight
poverty. It is possible that the committee will consider the guaranteed
income as a way of achieving that goal. Chretien is not expected to say
how he will attack poverty until his Throne Speech next month. If the
committee endorses the idea, conceivably it could still happen. Given that
all five of the major parties have either endorsed or seriously considered
some form of income guarantee at one time or another, there is some hope
that a broad coalition in favor of the idea could develop: Although they
will differ about the amount of income redistribution that should be done,
the various Canadian politicians could conceivably agree that an income
guarantee is the best way to redistribute income. But, such an agreement
does not seem likely. Nor does it seem likely that Chretien will make such
a proposal or make the needed effort to create such a coalition.
If the basic income guarantee is to succeed in Canada--or anywhere
else--it will need strong political leadership that will do more than
float a trial balloon. Leaders will need to convince the public of the
need for an income guarantee and build up a constituency in favor of it.
As is, the trial balloon was only an exciting piece of good news to the
tiny minority of people in Canada who already knew of and supported the
idea. Most likely, the Liberals did not make the guaranteed income an
issue in the campaign because they did not believe it was a political
winner and they didn't believe enough in the idea to risk their nearly
certain electoral victory to promote it. However, if the leadership in
Canada's Liberal Party decides to make such a bold move, the enactment of
a basic income guarantee could be closer than most supporters would have
thought possible.
-Karl Widerquist, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, 2001
