SCHULTE-BASTA, Dorothee (2010),Ökonomische Nützlichkeit oder leistungsloser Selbstwert? Zur Kompatibilität von Bedingungslosem Grundeinkommen und Katholischer Soziallehre, Freiberg: Zas, 2010.
Catholic social teaching is a body of doctrine developed by the Catholic Church on matters of poverty, wealth, economics, labor, social organization and the role of the state. Its foundation has been laid by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, and ever since than it is distinctive in its consistent critique of modern social and political ideologies both of the left and of the right. In her now published Master’s thesis, Schulte-Basta, who studied Theology, Philosophy and Communications in Muenster and Berlin, analyzes this critique in terms of Basic Income, as one of the most popular alternative to a marked-based form of organization. Analyzing the compatibility of Basic Income and Catholic Social Teaching, she gives a detailed overview in the history of Catholic Social Teaching in general and especially on the genesis of the key principles such as human dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity. In a second step she aligns their essence to the fundamental values of Basic Income. Her study finds that Basic Income does not contradict those key principles but instead helps to implement them by realizing human dignity, implementing solidarity in society and enabling people to help themselves. The book, first German-speaking overview on this topic, comes with a preface by Birgit Zenker, head of KAB, Germany’s Catholic Workers Movement.
BIRNBAUM, Simon (2010), ‘Radical liberalism, Rawls and the welfare state: justifying the politics of basic income’, Critical Review of InternationalSocial and Political Philosophy, 13(4): 495-516.
In response to recent policy trends towards linking social rights moretightly to work requirements, this article argues that those sharingRawlsian commitments have good reasons to prefer a radical-liberal policy agenda with a universal basic income at its core. Compared to its main rivals in present policy debates, the politics of basic income has greater potential to promote the economic life prospects of the least advantaged in a way that provides a robust protection for the bases of social recognition and non-subservience. The argument seeks to establish that these concerns should be ascribed priority in the most plausible balancing of Rawlsian objectives and that doing so generates a strong case for basic income. As recent arguments for basic income have suggested that Rawls’ theory is insufficient to make the case for such a reform, this analysis also demonstrates that a powerful argument for basic income can be built on Rawlsian foundations alone.
1000 Euro for everyone. Freedom. Equality. Basic Income is the title of a new book (€1.000 für Jeden: Freiheit. Gleichheit. Grundeinkommen in the original) by Götz W. Werner and Adrienne Goehler, published in August 2010. According to the Amazon.de website it is currently in place No. 1,563 of all books being sold, but in the category ‘Social Justice’ it is No. 1. It is clearly of considerable significance to find so much interest in a Citizen’s Income in a European country.
An interesting review of this book appears in the January Review of Books in Sp!ked. The first half of the review is factual and informative and is reproduced below (with permission from Sp!ked. You can read the original dated Friday 28 January 2011 at www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/10136/ )
The idea that the state should give everyone a basic income has seized the imagination of Germany’s middle class and politicians.
by Johannes Richardt (head of PR and communications at Novo Argumente publishing house)
At the moment, more than €1 trillion flows into the more or less state-controlled German welfare complex every year. Representing one third of German GDP, this vast amount of money covers every social benefit, from child allowance to health insurance. If the economic stats were not striking enough, of the 80 million people living in Germany only 40 per cent earn a wage. So a large proportion of the population is dependent either partially or wholly upon the state.
But the German welfare state does not just provide a financial safety net. It also seeks to regulate the behaviour of benefits claimants through various forms of lifestyle intervention, such as dictating how much claimants should be allowed to spend on cigarettes. In this regard, the so-called Hartz IV legislation, passed in 2005 by the then ruling Green-Social Democrat coalition, is important. Named after its originator, Peter Hartz – then a social democratic trade unionist and manager of part state-owned Volkswagen before being imprisoned for embezzlement in 2007 – Hartz IV effectively revised the status of the unemployed. They were no longer citizens in need of assistance while out of work: they were deemed welfare dependent. They were no longer people fallen on hard times, but fully capable of getting back into work: they were psychologically dependent upon welfare and incapable of getting back into work.
Hartz IV not only produced a new form of state dependency; it also sought to prepare these damaged citizens for work. To this end, a new sector of senseless and unproductive labour for about 1.5 million of the unemployed benefits claimants was created (thus removing them from unemployment statistics). Under the pretext of empowering the unemployed by psychologically preparing them for the labour market, these benefits claimants are forced into absurd and degrading activities run by highly subsidised companies with Orwellian-sounding names like Neue Arbeit [New Work]. One example of this absurd work-for-work’s-sake philosophy is the Toys Company. In more than 60 factories around Germany, the formerly unemployed people work for an extra €1 per hour on top of their out-of-work benefits, recycling second-hand toys for poor children. One task is to check the completeness of second-hand puzzles. ‘The record for completing the 5000-piece puzzle is just 10 days’, explained Toys Company’s manager, ‘although unfortunately we found out that three pieces were missing’. Götz Werner and Adrienne Goehler refer to this example in their new book 1000 € für Jeden. Freiheit. Gleichheit. Grundeinkommen. (€1000 Each. Liberty. Equality. Basic Income.) They argue for a new model of state welfare distribution which would replace the bureaucratic, behaviour-management regime of Hartz IV with one based on a simple premise: the state would pay everyone a basic income.
At first sight their central idea of a basic income for everybody seems quite charming: Every citizen gets €1,000 from the state every month from cradle to grave. As Werner, the billionaire founder of a drugstore chain, and Goehler, president of the Hamburg Art Academy, note, €1000 represents more than just a living wage. They argue that it also enables people to participate in the cultural life of society.
Because this would be an amount that every person would be legally entitled to, there would be no more degrading means tests and interventions in the lives of benefits claimants. The welfare bureaucracy as Germans know it would be redundant: the unemployed would be freed from doing compulsory labour promoted by the state, and the rest of society would be freed from the imperative of wage labour provided by the market. Income would be separated from work. As one would not need to sell one’s labour in order to guarantee an income, the authors argue, people could choose their line of work, for whom they want to work and for how long. This would lead to a new society in which self-realisation, creativity and compassion replace the existential fears created by the current rat race.
The German political class is partially sympathetic to the idea of a basic income. Hence, with the exception of the Social Democratic Party (plus trade unions), all parties represented in parliament have been discussing various models of basic income at some point in the past few years. For instance, in its party programme, the liberal Free Democratic Party calls for a Bürgergeld (Citizen’s Income), an amount paid out whenever necessary but low enough to maintain the incentive to work. Elsewhere, the Greens call for a Bedarfsorientiere Grundsicherung (needs-based basic provision), and even within the conservative Christian Democrat Party there is support for a Solidiarisches Bürgergeld (solidarity citizen’s income).
… Support for the idea [also] comes from the German middle class. Campaign groups with names like ‘Freedom Instead of Full Employment’ and ‘Federal Agency of Income’ have emerged, advertising their ideas on various websites, in films and at events and demonstrations. It is important to note that support for a basic income does not come from unemployed and poorly educated low-wage employees. It comes from privileged and educated young professionals with middle-class backgrounds who, working in poorly-paid, insecure positions in the media and cultural sector, hope for an unconditional basic income to make their lives that little bit more secure. This is no struggle for abundance for all. For these metropolitan types, a basic income promises security, opportunities for self-realisation and psychological well-being.
It is to the fears and prejudices of this post-material milieu that the book €1000 Each speaks. In this way, the book exemplifies the rampant social pessimism so prominent in contemporary Western societies. The authors describe the insecure working conditions of the ‘creative class’, surviving on short-term contracts and project work, as the future for a society that has given up on the goal of well-paid and meaningful work for everyone. According to the authors, only a minority of people will earn their money in secure, long-term work. The rest of us will be left to the fate currently endured by the creative class, the ‘vanguard of precarious conditions’.
Referring to American sociologist Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 book The End of Work, Werner and Goehler argue that the advance of globalisation, automation and rationalisation has led to a post-industrial society in which production can no longer serve as the basis of societal wealth. Economic growth, they assert, ‘is a dead duck’. Instead, Werner and Goehler urge us to focus on creativity as ‘the only remaining, sustainably exploitable resource of the twenty-first century’. This is why they argue for a basic income. Because to tap into this resource of creativity, while avoiding the social unrest that will come with the shortage of constant, paid work, requires everyone to be accorded a level of material security.
This is where the first half of the review ends. The second half of the review is highly critical of the whole idea of a Citizen’s Income: ‘Basic income, low aspiration: The idea that the state should give everyone a basic income has seized the imagination of Germany’s middle class and politicians. Their enthusiasm is testament only to the poverty of their ambition’ is the full title of the review. In the next issue of the Citizen’s Income Newsletter these anti-CI views will be reproduced and critically examined.
Review of Just Distribution: Rawlsian Liberalism and the Politics of Basic Income by Simon Birnbaum. Stockholm Studies in Politics 122, Stockholm University 2008: ISBN: 978-91-7155-570-0
Review by Karl Widerquist, originally published in the Citizens Income Newsletter, 12th February 2009
Simon Birnbaum
Simon Birnbaum is a newcomer to the basic income debate who has quickly worked his way into the basic income movement. He completed his doctorate in 2008 at Stockholm University, and has already been awarded fellowships at Oxford University and at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium under the supervision of Philippe Van Parijs. He has only been publishing since 2005, but he has already published six academic articles and chapters, five of which are on basic income.
Just Distribution is Birnbaum’s doctoral thesis. It is not an easy read. It is 240 pages of dense political philosophy that only people who intend to get deeply into the philosophical debate over basic income will want to read in full. It is aimed at people who have already read several of John Rawls’s major works and some of the more philosophical works on distributive justice in general and basic income in particular. However, many of the arguments in this book are of interest to a wider audience, and I will try to give readers of CIT Newsletter a brief introduction to them.
Birnbaum’s starting point in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, one of the most influential works of political philosophy of the Twentieth Century. Rawls’s most famous proposition, “the difference principle,” stated that the distribution of benefits from the joint social project should take incentives into account, but decision makers should use incentives to maximize the benefit to the least advantaged individual. When do we stop giving more to high achievers? When doing so ceases to be in the interest of the least advantaged people. Such a principle sounds favorable to basic income, but Rawls balked when confronted with the question of whether the difference principle should benefit lazy “surfers” who enjoy the benefits of the social project without contributing. The least advantaged individual in Rawls’s theory is not necessarily the poorest person, but the poorest contributor to the social project, apparently ruling out basic income.
Birnbaum’s project is to admit that the surfer problem exists but to argue that on balance an unconditional basic income would further the overall goals of a Rawlsian economy. The surfer problem is a strike against basic income, but it need not be decisive, if basic income has other benefits that further Rawlsian goals. Birnbaum discusses many such benefits. For example, many contributors would benefit from the assurance of unconditional support. People who contribute to the social project in ways other than paid labor will share more in the benefits they help create and will be better able to make their contribution if an unconditional basic income is available. Subjecting disadvantaged people to extensive supervision to make sure that they are eligible for conditional redistribution is harmful to the self-respect that Rawlsianism is supposed to accord to contributors. Basic income gives workers the power to refuse exploitive working conditions. Finally, there is a large amount of wealth in society that attaches to nonhuman resources, and that can therefore be distributed unconditionally without violating any principles of fairness to contributors.
The latter half of the book responds to criticisms based on reciprocity, responsibility, and feasibility. A regular basic income can be important to upholding the security and autonomy individuals need to make well-informed choices as self-respecting, equal citizens, and it, therefore, helps maintain responsibility. Birnbaum concedes that a contributory ethos is necessary to maintain a Rawlsian society with or without basic income and that basic income might therefore lead to exploitation of those who hold the necessary ethos by those who don’t. However, there is also a tension between the effort to eliminate any such exploitation and the neutrality-based goals of a liberal society. Birnbaum concludes that given the constraints of feasibility, there is a tentative case to be made for a mixed redistributional system with some redistribution coming in the form of conditional benefits and some coming in the form of unconditional basic income.
Book review of “Libertarianism without inequality,” by Michael Otsuka14th February 2005, Oxford University Press, 2003, 158 pages
Review by Karl Widerquist, originally published in the Citizens Income Newsletter, 14th February 2005
According to the dust jacket, “Michael Otsuka sets out to vindicate left-libertarianism, a political philosophy which combines stringent rights of control over one’s own mind, body, and life with egalitarian rights of ownership of the world.” In so doing, he creates a political philosophy more true to the ideal of self-ownership than libertarian philosophers such as Robert Nozick, and more true to the idea of society as a voluntary association than liberal egalitarian philosophers such as John Rawls. Otsuka reconsiders self-ownership and the “Lockean proviso” on which much of Nozick’s argument against the redistribution of property rests. He presents his work as a revision of Locke, but one that is true to the voluntary spirit of Locke’s treatise.
Otsuka defines “robust self-ownership” as “in addition to having the libertarian right itself, one also has rights over enough worldly resources to ensure that one will not be forced by necessity to come to the assistance of others in a manner involving the sacrifice of one’s life, limb, or labour”. Nozick does not consider robust self-ownership and seems willing to sacrifice it to preserve nominal self-ownership and unrestricted rights of property ownership. He, therefore, ends up with a world in which people are much less free than Otsuka’s society.
Locke, like many other philosophers, begins with the recognition that all people have equal claim to the land and resources of the world, and argues that individuals can appropriate portions of it as long as they leave “enough and as good” for everyone else. If one interprets this to mean that others are no worse off than they would be in a primitive state of nature, the proviso allows great inequalities to result from the appropriation of land. But Otsuka defines an “egalitarian proviso” to mean that one can only appropriate resources if they leave others with the ability to acquire an equally advantageous share. Such a rule might allow inequalities, but none that follow from control of resources outside of one’s own mind and body.
By basing his theory of government on the principles of robust libertarian self-ownership and the egalitarian Lockean proviso, Otsuka seeks to create a society in which all people give their actual consent to the political society in which they live, not the weak tacit consent offered by Locke nor the hypothetical consent offered by Rawls. Otsuka goes on to apply his theory to issues such as the right to punish and intergenerational equity. However, the distributive implications of these two principles will be of most interest to readers of the Citizen’s Income Newsletter.
Otsuka does not discuss what practical policy would be needed to ensure that these two principles are upheld in a modern society, and he does not discuss basic income at all. He sticks instead to the hypothetical model of an agrarian society in which these principles can be attained by granting plots of land. However, a very good case for basic income could be made using these two principles. The egalitarian proviso justifies a large amount of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor, and the principle of robust libertarian self-ownership implies that redistribution should come in the form of an unconditional grant large enough to cover one’s basic needs. What policy could do this other than basic income?
