I was recently asked whether the statement “Thomas Paine was a proponent of Universal Basic Income” is true. Although that statement is slightly controversial, it is true. Let me explain: Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a contested concept. Different people within the UBI movement use the term differently. The policy Paine advocates in “Agrarian Justice” fits most of the popular
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I wasn’t planning to write about the British elections until a friend asked. I’m not confident that I’m right about my conclusions, but here are some disjointed thoughts in no particular order. 1. I hate the parallels between US & UK politics: You get Thatcher-Major. We get Reagan-Bush I. We get Clinton. You get Blair. We get Bush II. Blair
» Read moreAn early version of the book, A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments, is available for free download on my selected works website. 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
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Karl Widerquist (This article was originally published by Open Democracy, 17 September 2019) UBI is the opposite of something for nothing. It is the just compensation for all the one-sided rules of property and property regulations that society imposes on individuals. The biggest threat to freedom in the world today is economic destitution. We need universal basic income (UBI) because
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This whole program is voluntary…The men don’t have to…if they don’t want to. But we need you to starve them to death if they don’t. –“Milo Minderbinder,” Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Basic Income does something virtually no other policy in the modern economy can do: it protects your status as a free person. What does it mean to be a free
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An early version of the book, Exporting the Alaska Model, is available for download for the first time. This is possible because most academic publishers allow authors and editors to post early versions of their works on their person websites. A preview, written in 2012, is below. If you’d like to cite or quote it, please refer to the published
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A new book looks back at the effects of Namibia’s Basic Income pilot project on the villagers who received the grant. Publication information: Claudia & Dirk Haarmann, 2019, Basic Income Grant Otjivero, Namibia – 10 years. Windhoek, Namibia: Economic & Social Justice Trust The following is the authors’ announcement: Ten years after the Basic Income Grant pilot project in Otjivero,
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In this Video Interview, Dan Schneider interviews me about the book Grant S. McCall and I coedited: Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy. Schneider and I talk about the myth that the state and the private property rights system benefit ever last citizen and how it is used to justify mistreatment of disadvantaged people in industrial societies and of indigenous
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The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee (2005) edited by Karl Widerquist, Michael Anthony Lewis, and Steven Pressman, published by Publishing is availed in a free version at this link. This book available because most publishers allow authors and editors to post early version for free on their personal websites. That means it has lots of typos and
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This is the first guest post on The Indepentarian Blog. Welcome, Rahul. Author: Rahul Basu The Future We Need This is a comment on Karl Widerquist’s excellent proposal for a People’s Endowment. I’m a member of The Future We Need (TFWN), a global campaign to make the intergenerational equity principle foundational for our civilization. Similar to Karl, the core idea
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