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.
Tribal groups, in which all men and women on Earth have lived since humanity emerged, have functioned through cooperation and solidarity among their members in tasks such as obtaining and distributing food, building shelters, and family dwellings or taking care of community assets; tasks that today we would call ‘economic’. In fact, over hundreds of thousands of years of human presence on Earth the whole economy was cooperative and supportive. And at the time it was sustainable. About 6,000 years ago things began to change when the first sophisticated civilizations arose and put into practice a variety of new forms of economic organization; from the range of traditional systems based on agriculture or trade to, subsequently, feudalism, mercantilism and everything else after that. Today, however, all the economic diversity that existed over those 6,000 years is virtually nullified, and an (almost) unique model has once again consolidated. It is called capitalism, and it has been going on for about 200 years.
Ancestral economies were based on solidarity and cooperation among people, on a harmony between them and nature and on an orientation towards the mere satisfaction of their needs. Capitalism is characterized by competition among peers, by the predation of the Earth and by an orientation of its agents aiming at unlimited material accumulation. Both modes are hegemonic, each in its own time, but that is about as much as these modes have in common.
Can, like its ancestral homologous form, the present ‘state of the art’ in economic organization – capitalism – last for hundreds of thousands of years? It does not seem possible, given the condition in which it left the planet and humans, after only 200 years. Earth’s soils, rivers, oceans, and atmosphere are now filled with the poisons left over from our economic activity; the climate is changing, the elements unsettled and life as we know it may be doomed, if we do not make deep and rapid changes. As for us humans, materialistic as we have become, we too often forget who we really are and can do: our nature as creators; our ability to generate art, mathematics or philosophy; our potential for freedom, for choosing paths, for changing ourselves and the world as we decide, and the lack of any natural bound between us and what we can achieve or be. By forgetting so much, we reduce ourselves to economic roles, going now so far as to even discuss whether artificial intelligence and robots will make us pointless and expendable one day. The culprit is our current economic culture and system.
However, despite its pitfalls, an important merit can be attributed to capitalism: with the demand for accumulation and profit, it has given us machinery, techniques, and knowledge that can now allow us to access the resources necessary for the material comfort of all. This is only a possibility though since these machines, techniques, and knowledge only provide the capacity, not the guarantee of its use.
Our collective future is unforeseeable. It will be the result of an infinity of both conscious choices and involuntary actions, taken by billions of individuals and groups, in a chaotic general movement that no one can control or anticipate. And yet, it can be felt that capitalism would make no sense in human history unless it was fated to eventually free us from the shackles of material scarcity. Hence, the great economic question of our time must be: how to accomplish the potential that capitalism offers us? The simple ‘progress’, as currently evolving, does not seem to be the way. Reality shows us, everywhere, that the mere growth of the present economy, without any change or innovation in its logic and processes, will never free us. Neither will the strengthening of the so-called welfare state, in its traditional, bureaucratic, expensive and life-controlling form. It can do no more than mitigate poverty, but at a high cost in dignity to its beneficiaries, and a cost in humanity to all the others. The more unnecessary this becomes the more intolerable it gets.
Each one of us, rich or poor, directly or indirectly is suffering from the lack of a process which guarantees the essentials for all. Clearly, this is no longer a problem of production capacity, but one of economic organization. The satisfaction of the basic needs of all people is not inherent to capitalism, nor has it ever been added to it. However, without such process, we will not rid ourselves from the specter of material poverty, and therefore from this never-enough culture in which we find ourselves in. Mainly reduced to producers and consumers, we are exhausting the energy that could alternatively be spent in higher occupations which our potential allows and claims for us.
And yet, we can immediately introduce such process of guaranteeing the essentials for all: let us recover from our ancestral economic way its core element of solidarity among people.
A Future – the UBI-AA
Solidarity among people is the essential idea behind the alternative resource distribution model here described: the Unconditional Basic Income of All for All, or ‘UBI-AA’.
UBI-AA is a revenue redistribution process, generically designed to operate monthly, providing automatic and unconditional transfers among citizens, from those who have higher incomes to those with lower or no income at all. Built, supported and leveraged by them alone, the process will invite participants to take responsibility and engage in their communities, which will reinforce these.
It works in two stages:
1) As it is acquired, each member of the community discounts to a common fund – a ‘UBI Fund’ – a proportion of their income, at a single and universal rate;
2) At the end of each month, the Fund’s accumulated total is equally and unconditionally distributed among all members of the same community.
This simple process, which demands the same effort from all participants while offering them the same benefit, treats everyone equally. It turns those who, at each moment in time, have above-average incomes into net payers to the UBI Fund, and those who have below-average incomes into net receivers. Thus, the process operates a joint distribution among participants of part of their individual incomes. In addition to reducing inequalities, this solidarity among peers creates an unconditional guarantee of income for all, that is, an Unconditional Basic Income.
It follows from the UBI-AA process that the loss of available income by some will be the gain of others. Importantly, for the scheme to be accepted by the former and really useful to the latter, the losses involved should be moderate and the gains significant. This should not, however, lead to a devaluation in the possibilities of the mutability of all individual positions. As time goes by and while exercising the options which the process itself opens to participants, individual situations of income ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ should always be seen as circumstantial.
To achieve its intended effects, the implementation of the UBI-AA should be accompanied by the release of its participants from the burden of personal income tax. Such tax relief will compensate them for the contributory effort required by the UBI-AA process. However, for those above a certain level of income, such compensation may turn out to be merely partial.
Once the personal income tax is abolished, the moderation of losses for citizens with above-average incomes and, simultaneously, the material significance of gains to those with under-average incomes, will be possible if the rate of contributions to the UBI Fund is set at an optimal level, balancing the two outcomes.
A more complete description of the UBI-AA process, as well as a simulation of the financial effects it would have produced, both in individual citizen spheres and in the State budget, hypothesizing it in force in Portugal in 2012, can be reached here.
UBI-AA differs from most current traditional redistributive processes because it is unconditional. It also differs from most unconditional alternative processes since it is a construct of common citizens, instead of a government, a central bank or any other ‘power’ policy. We see it as a humane alternative to organizing the economy on its distributive side. Operating through the income distribution process described above, it will favor the rehabilitation of values such as solidarity and voluntary cooperation among people, and the creation of an unconditional guarantee of income for all will be a corollary.
We cherish the hope that this may contribute to the flourishing of a new and less materialistic culture. Who knows, if making everybody’s access to essential material resources as simple as breathing, will not end up instilling in people the same attitude towards those resources – money and the things it buys – as the one we have towards the air we breathe: no matter how valuable it may be to us, we do not quarrel with each other for it; we only use it in the quantities we need; accumulating it does not even occur to us. Such a cultural shift would certainly be a great human civilizational progress and a much-needed step towards a reconciliation between us and our environment.
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.
Annie Lowrey is the author of “Give People Money,” the latest book to offer the case for Universal Basic Income in the United States. She recently spoke to the UBI Podcast about her new book.
Lowrey first wrote about basic income in the New York Times for a 2013 article about the Swiss UBI referendum. This was right before the surge of international interest in basic income that persists today.
“Give People Money” gives a straightforward account of basic income for a broad audience, emphasizing the increasingly precarious situation for workers around the world. Lowrey gives a voice to actual recipients of basic income pilots who are quoted in the book as being empowered by the unconditional cash transfers.
In the podcast, Lowrey said what draws her to basic income is how the “universality” of the program unlocks discussion about an array of societal issues.
“It lets you talk about feminism, it lets you talk about the problems with GDP and how we measure welfare, about government paternalism,” she said.
There have been criticisms of Lowrey’s book and others that discuss UBI for the lack of specifics regarding financing.
She said such a demand at this time is a “high-barrier to clear” for financing a full basic income.
“Almost all of our big social programs have started small and gotten bigger,” she said.
Regarding political feasibility, Lowrey said she would be willing to accept “marginal improvements” that may be more feasible in the short-term, such as an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (which is only provided to those who are working and is targeted for lower income households).
For Lowrey, the evidence for cash transfers is “unbelievably straightforward.”
“We know that giving people cash is an unusually good way to get them out of poverty,” she said. “We know that it doesn’t stop them from working.”
“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.
