by Kate McFarland | Sep 8, 2016 | News
Nickolaus Hines, a writer based in New York City, has published a new article on automation and basic income in Inverse, a year-old website concentrating on tech news. (This is not Hines’ first article for the site on the topic; in July, he wrote a piece on the White House roundtable discussion with Martin Ford and Robin Chase.)
Despite the article’s title, Hines does not focus exclusively on the modern issue of automation; he also takes some time to look back at the movement for guaranteed income in the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, he clarifies an often elided distinction between the then-popular guaranteed income and “basic income” as it is often discussed today (including as it is defined by BIEN):
“Nixon, King, and others were championing a guaranteed income, however, not a universal income. Government funds would be allocated only to the working poor, not every man, woman, and child.”
Hines draws upon interviews with two American BIEN members named ‘Michael’: Michael Howard (Professor at the University of Maine, coeditor of Basic Income Studies and organizer of BIEN’s US affiliate) and Michael Lewis (Associate Professor at CUNY).
Among other topics, the article touches upon the question of how worries about automation might help to push America towards a basic income. According to Lewis:
For a country that is so committed to work ethic, the only way to convince people that a basic income is necessary is if they are convinced that people can’t find work. If it’s going to happen, automation is going to bring it about.
Read the full article here:
Nickolaus Hines, “Robots Could Make Basic Income a Necessity“, Inverse; Aug 11, 2016.
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 Jeff
by Kate McFarland | Aug 29, 2016 | News
Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written an article in Boston Review in which she analyzes and reviews the political and economic theories of Thomas Paine, Friedrich Hayek, and others.
Anderson identifies the roots of modern systems of social insurance in Paine’s Agrarian Justice. She traces the history of the idea and its implementation through the late 1800s — when German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck instituted the world’s first social insurance scheme — and on to the present. In the latter half of the article, she critiques Hayek’s opposition to social insurance programs such as Bismarck’s pension system. Whilst people are fine with people getting insurance from Covered.com.au or other sites, there can be confusion about this part of the social system. Anderson connects modern right-wing opposition to the welfare state with Hayek’s criticisms of social insurance, criticisms which she argues to be unwarranted.
The article is not presented as an argument for basic income, but as a general defense of social welfare schemes — especially those that protect the middle classes. Indeed, Anderson herself clearly favors Bismarck-type schemes, in which “pension and disability benefits were graded according to each payer’s contributions” over Paine’s (and Hayek’s) idea of distributing equal benefits to all. She only mentions basic income “by name” when describing right-wing proposals, such as that of Charles Murray. She rejects these right-leaning basic income proposals — which would do away with all other benefits and keep individual subsidies below the poverty line — as insufficiently generous and detrimental to the middle class.
Although she seldom discussing basic income directly, Anderson situates some of the idea’s most important predecessors in their historical and political contexts. Paine’s Agrarian Justice and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom are both canonical works in the history of the basic income movement. However, Paine and Hayek endorse very different types of basic income policies, for different reasons and as responses to different political currents — which Anderson’s article does much to illuminate.
Elizabeth Anderson is the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan (or, as we say here in Columbus, “the school up north”). Her areas of research in democratic theory, equality, racial integration, the ethics of markets, rational choice theories, and the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. Her current work focuses on the history of egalitarianism.
Read the full article here:
Elizabeth Anderson, “Common Property: How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism,” Boston Review; July 25, 2016.
Photo: Statue of Otto von Bismarck, via Bernt Rostad
by Tyler Prochazka | Aug 24, 2016 | Opinion
One of the most visible libertarian advocates of the basic income is Dr. Matt Zwolinski. Zwolinski is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego and has written extensively on the libertarian case for the basic income.
In my interview with Zwolinski, he said a basic income “can help protect the freedom of certain vulnerable people,” although he recognizes there is a trade-off due to the coercive nature of taxes.
Zwolinski also dismissed some of the common libertarian objections to the basic income, saying it is a hard moral sell to claim taxation to help the poor is indistinguishable from a mugger stealing for himself.
“I think there’s a moral case, based on freedom and a correct theory of property rights, that justifies some form of economic redistribution,” he said.
For those libertarians that think basic income disqualifies them from the libertarian label, Zwolisnki said this does not make much sense since many libertarian thinkers throughout history have advocated for the basic income approach.
“Libertarianism is and should remain a pretty big tent,” Zwolinski said.
As a libertarian, what is the best reason to support UBI?
I don’t think that there’s a single best reason. I’m a pluralist in my moral philosophy, and so I think that a lot of different kinds of reasons are usually appropriate in assessing the case for or against a particular piece of public policy.
But, basically, I think there are two strong libertarian arguments in support of a basic income, one broadly deontological in nature and the other broadly consequentialist. The deontological argument has to do with the limits to the libertarian case for private property. For reasons that I think were very well laid out by Herbert Spencer in 1851, I don’t think the standard Lockean story about self-ownership and labor mixing gets us very far in justifying private property in land and other natural resources. For starters, that account simply doesn’t match the historical reality in which most private property originated in force and theft rather than peaceful homesteading. But, more fundamentally, I just don’t see how mixing your labor in a natural object gets you a property right in the whole economic value of that object, as opposed to a right to that portion of the value created by your labor. Basically, I think Henry George was right. And so I think that there’s a strong case to be made for a basic income funded by a “Single Tax” on “land rent” – the economic value of unimproved natural resources such as land.
The more consequentialist case has to do with protecting individual freedom. I call it a consequentialist case rather than a utilitarian one deliberately. The idea is that a basic income can help protect the freedom of certain vulnerable people. But I recognize that a basic income that’s large and broad enough to do that might have to be funded by taxes that violate the freedom of others. So we’re trading off freedom for freedom. That might sound scary to some libertarians, but I think that unless you’re an anarchist you’re already willing to accept something like this. Tax-funded police services, after all, protect individual freedom but are funded by coercive taxation.
I think the seeds for a freedom-based defense of a basic income are present in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, especially in his Constitution of Liberty. Hayek himself defended a kind of basic income, but was never entirely clear about what he saw the justification for it to be. I’ve tried to work out what a plausible Hayekian justification might be, at least in terms of broad outlines. Basically, I see Hayek as embracing a kind of republican account of liberty, where freedom means not just not being subject to the initiation of force but, more generally, not being subject to the arbitrary will of any other person. Once you take that account of freedom on board, I think you can justify a basic income as a way of protecting the economically vulnerable. The idea is that people who might otherwise have to accept any offer an employer makes or else starve aren’t really free. A basic income gives them the ability to say “no,” and thus protects them from being bossed around by the economically powerful.
One interesting thing to note about these two arguments is that they’re not just different in terms of where they start – the moral premises on which they’re based. I think they’re also different in terms of where they end up – in the kind of basic income they justify. If the Georgist argument works, I think that justifies a truly universal basic income. The earth belongs to all of us, and so all of us have an equal claim to the economic value of unimproved natural resources. Now, depending on how much of present wealth you think is due to labor, rather than raw natural resources, the value of this kind of basic income might not be very large. So, on this argument, what you might end up with is a very broad but relatively small basic income. Everybody gets something, but nobody gets much.
The freedom-based argument, on the other hand, doesn’t give us any reason to write a check to Bill Gates. His freedom is already protected by his economic power, so there’s no real point in giving him any more money. And the same will be true of a lot of other people, not just the rich but probably most of the middle class as well. So if the case for a basic income is based on the protection of individual freedom, I think what that gets you is something less than a universal basic income. Not everybody gets something, but what those who need it get will be large enough to effectively protect them against economic domination by others.
What would your ideal UBI look like?
Designing a policy like a universal basic income is obviously a complicated task. And I think it’s a task that should be highly sensitive not only to the kinds of moral considerations with which I spend most of my time as a philosopher, but to empirical considerations of the kinds studied by economists, sociologists, and the like. So I don’t want to claim that I’ve got anything close to the final word on this. I have some ideas, but this is definitely not a one-person project.
That said, I think that given the two distinct moral considerations that justify a basic income, there’s a case to be made for having two distinct basic income type policies that respond to those considerations. One would be a small, truly universal cash grant based on the economic value of unimproved natural resources. Think of this as something like the Alaskan Permanent Fund writ large. The other would be a less universal but more generous grant directed toward those individuals who fall below a certain specified threshold of economic sufficiency. I think the best way of implementing this second program is probably something like Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax, though I also like the proposal set forth by Charles Murray in his book, In Our Hands. In both cases, people earning less than a certain amount of money get a cash grant from the government, with which they can do whatever they wish; while people earning more than that amount get nothing. That conditionality makes the program less than truly universal. But I think you’ve got to do something like that in order to make a basic income economically feasible. Many basic income enthusiasts want a grant that is (1) universal, (2) large enough to provide people with an adequate level of income, and (3) economically affordable. But you can’t satisfy all three of those conditions at once. A Negative Income Tax satisfies conditions (2) and (3), which to my mind are the most important conditions, morally speaking. Condition (1) might be politically important in terms of generating and sustaining support for the program. I’m not sure. But it seems to me that something has to give, and I think there’s a strong case to be made for keeping (2) and (3) and relegating (1) to the land-tax component of the joint program.
Many libertarians say removing all welfare would be superior to replacing welfare with the UBI. Do you agree with this sentiment?
No, I don’t think so. But before I explain why, let’s be clear about two different conversations we could have about this question. One is a conversation about ideals – what is the best kind of society we could imagine as libertarians, regardless of how different that society might look from our own? The other conversation is about pragmatics – what should libertarians advocate here and now, given all the injustices, imperfections and disagreements with which any practical political proposal has to deal?
Now, as it happens, I don’t think either of those conversations gets you to the conclusion that all state-based welfare ought to be eliminated. That’s certainly not something that has any practical chance of being implemented in a world where, after all, most people aren’t libertarians. But I don’t think it’s very attractive as an ideal, either. I think there’s a moral case, based on freedom and a correct theory of property rights, that justifies some form of economic redistribution. Obviously, we’ve had a lot of bad redistribution in our society. We’ve have redistribution to the poor that’s made their lives worse, rather than better. And we’ve had a lot of straightforwardly regressive redistribution that actually takes money and opportunities away from the poor and channels it toward the better off. And libertarians have rightly criticized those programs. But the idea that anytime the state takes money from the well-off and gives it to the poor, that’s morally indistinguishable from a mugger on the street taking your wallet at gunpoint, well, that’s a hard sell. And not, I think, simply because non-libertarians are being thick-headed.
In my experience, many libertarians have called me a statist and denied me the label of libertarian for supporting the UBI. Have you had similar experiences and what is your reaction?
Sure, I get that all the time. Some people seem to think a desire to eliminate the welfare state is just part of what it means to be a libertarian. But what’s their basis for that? That Murray Rothbard thought so? Or Ayn Rand? But why should we take them as the final say on what libertarianism is or isn’t?
As I’ve written about before, there are a number of people who fall pretty squarely in the libertarian intellectual tradition – Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Herbert Spencer, to name a few – who don’t hold that view. Why should their views count any less toward defining what libertarianism is than Murray Rothbard’s?
I’m finishing up a book on the history of libertarian thought with John Tomasi. And one of the themes of that book is that the libertarian intellectual tradition is incredibly pluralistic. Some libertarians are consequentialists, some are deontologists, and some are ethical egoists. Some are anarchists, some are minimal-statists, and some are classical liberals. Of course, not all of those views can be right, and libertarians should (and do!) argue amongst themselves about which view is the best libertarian view. But I think it’s silly – and more than a little ironic! – for libertarians to try to write people with whom they disagree out of libertarianism altogether on the basis of some putative ideological authority. Libertarianism is and should remain a pretty big tent.
by Kate McFarland | Aug 14, 2016 | News, Testimonies
Juon Kim has been an organizer of Basic Income Youth Network in Korea since 2013. In March of this year, Juon ran for a proportionate candidate of Green Party Korea in the general election, representing the party’s UBI agenda. She’s currently a graduate student of cultural anthropology, and plans to write her MA thesis about basic income.
In this Basic Income Interview, Juon talks about how she came to learn about and support basic income, and why she is now an activist.
About 5 years ago, only a few people in Korea knew about basic income, including my friends. Since they were studying basic income, I became aware of it but was not attracted to it at first. But after reading two women’s books, I decided to live as a UBI advocate and joined the Basic Income Youth Network based in South Korea.
One book is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “It is necessary for women to have five hundred pounds a year and a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.” It reminded me of basic income immediately. The other is Carole Pateman, a feminist political theorist saying that basic income could guarantee universal economic citizenship of women.
Juon at the 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul
When I was young, I dreamt of becoming a human rights lawyer. Many discrepancies in the society seemed to have been caused by law which is a tool only for the powerful. I entered university envisioning that I would stand in the forefront of social changes with the law as the tool for justice. I was even thinking of branding law firm ideas to increase my chances of being someone’s first choice to defend them.
But the university that I encountered back in 2010 was no more than a ruin. The gravity of making ends meet pulled heavily against my attempted search for friends with whom I would find solutions to the social ills. No time could be wasted if it wasn’t for career preparation, no space was available without fees, and ultimately no freedom to plan my life as I wanted was granted.
Fortunately, there were great classes and friends in and out of the campus. There were those who were being forcefully evacuated from the very place of their livelihoods in their cities, those who are taking their lives in their hands just to reclaim their lost jobs, and those religious figures, LGBT activists, disability-rights activists, grass-root activists and youth activists who fought against state violence and its forced militarization of Gangjeong village in Jeju island and forced nuclearization of Miryang in Korea.
I saw how they tried and worked to rebuild hope in their own respective communities. We met in support, delight and equality. I experienced happiness rising from others even amidst poor material conditions.
In our encounters I realized something. All of us who were dreaming of a better life, one that’s better than now, were in fact fighting against ‘dual poverty’. They fought against poverty of their own and simultaneously poverty of the world.
What I endured was not different from what they endured. It was in this moment I was introduced to the idea of ‘basic income’. I strongly related to its philosophy that the rights to eat and live should be guaranteed just for the reason that I am a constituent of this society.
What if the activists I met who suffered from dual poverty had basic income? What if my colleagues, women, youth and young adults, farmers, artists and seniors had basic income? What happens when there appears this gift called basic income in the Korean society, whose severe income bipolarization and winner-takes-all structures in all corners render all untrustworthy toward each other?
I imagined an alternative made possible by the hope called basic income to those who give up their lives or terrorize others’ lives because there cannot be a better tomorrow. Then I joined basic income movement because I wanted to imagine all these possibilities as one.
The ‘human rights’ that used to be so nondescript when I wanted to be its lawyer took shape as an economic citizenship, basic income. Basic income as the fundamental right for all humans. I hope it becomes a common sense to all everywhere in the world in the nearest future.
Photos used by permission of Juon Kim. (Cover photo: Juon promotes basic income at International Women’s Day, dressed as a suffragette.)
Juon wishes to thank her friend Heehe for translation assistance.
Basic Income Interviews is a special recurring segment of Basic Income News, introduced in July 2016 by Jason Murphy and Kate McFarland. Through a series of short interviews, we aspire to display the diversity of support that basic income receives throughout the world.
Have your own thoughts to contribute? Want to see yourself in a future Basic Income Interview?
Visit our interview form.
by Kate McFarland | Aug 7, 2016 | News, Testimonies
Jennifer Lawson studied philosophy and psychology at Stetson University and the University of North Florida. During graduate school, she suffered several psychotic breaks, and now lives on disability. Jennifer has been an advocate and activist for over twenty years.
How did you hear about Basic Income?
I studied political philosophy in graduate school. This means being fluent in all stripes of political argument. One day, while perusing the blogs, which I did quite often as a blogger for my university, I found some Libertarian arguments for Basic Income. This was a flavor of Libertarian who understands that poverty should be alleviated, but wants small government, too. I found the arguments compelling.
Why do you support a Basic Income?
I support a Basic Income because I am now disabled, and receive disability. There was a time, when I was applying for disability, where I had no income whatsoever. People who apply for disability often have a long waiting period during which time they have no money. This was a struggle for me because I still had bills and needs. I figured that if a Basic Income existed, there wouldn’t have been a time where I had no income coming in.
Photo used by permission of Jennifer Lawson.
Basic Income Interviews is a special recurring segment of Basic Income News, introduced in July 2016 by Jason Murphy and Kate McFarland. Through a series of short interviews, we aspire to display the diversity of support that basic income receives throughout the world.
Have your own thoughts to contribute? Want to see yourself in a future Basic Income Interview? Visit our interview form.
