BIEN | Opinion

No doubt most Basic Income News readers are aware of an interesting intersection where the arguments for basic income overlap with the arguments on how to best control global warming.

Discussions of the advantages of a universal unconditional and nonwithdrawable benefits will generally list both the lower marginal deduction rates that individuals would experience compared with those imposed by means-tested benefits, and such social benefits as a greater social cohesion generated by everyone receiving the same Citizen’s Income. What is not always recognised is that changes experienced by one individual might cause changes for another.

The purchase of Oculus by Facebook for $2 billion is the new best example of the growing inequality inherent in 21st century capitalism – what Paul Mason describes as the The Fourth Wave. A few people just got really rich, while the thousands of people who helped build the company from nothing, through $2.5 million of crowdsourced capital and a thriving open-source developer community didn’t.

The increasing use of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) has perhaps been one of the most significant additions to the social development agenda of late. CCTs are now key components of many governments’ poverty elimination programmes and feature centrally in the UN’s current Social Protection Floor initiative. The mainstream media has also taken note and lent support in favour of their adoption.

Malcolm Torry, Money for Everyone: Why we need a Citizen’s Income, Policy Press, 2013, xiv + 300 pp, 1 44731 125 6, pbk, £24.99, 1 44731 124 9, hbk, £70 Malcolm Torry delivers a blockbuster argument in favour of a Citizen’s Income to wholly or partially replace...

David Reisman, The Social Economics of Thorstein Veblen, Edward Elgar, 2012, vii + 338 pp, hbk, 0 85793 218 1, £90 The dust jacket suggests that Thorstein Veblen’s writings are ‘difficult to read and understand’. Perhaps they are, but most of the many passages quoted...

Nathalie Morel, Bruno Palier and Joakim Palme (eds), Towards a Social Investment Welfare State? Ideas, policies and challenges, Policy Press, 2012, xiv + 386 pp, pbk, 1 847 42925 4, £19.99, hbk, 1 847 42924 7, £70 Is the welfare state a cost or an investment? To take...

Robert A. Becker (ed.), The Economic Theory of Income Inequality, Edward Elgar, 2013, 0 85793 908 1, hbk, lvii + 636 pp, £225 Ten years ago, Edward Elgar published a two volume collection of reprinted articles, The Economics of Poverty and Inequality, edited by Frank...

This essay begins and ends with a genuine question: Given the proven desirability and financial feasibility of a Citizen’s Income, why does a Citizen’s Income not appear to be politically feasible?

In 1797 Thomas Paine suggested that, because in principle the land belongs to everyone equally, those who occupy it should pay a ground rent to the whole community. We can generalise the profits that landowners reap from the occupation of land into the concept of ‘economic rent’: if someone uses natural resources that belongs to all of us in order to make money, then any income greater than the cost of production is ‘economic rent’. Paine would have made the point that the economic rent belongs to all of us.