by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 18, 2012 | Opinion
Matthew C. Murray and Carole Pateman (eds), Basic Income Worldwide: Horizons of Reform, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xv + 271 pp, hbk, 0 230 28542 2, £57.50
This book is a most useful survey of international experience of Basic or Citizen’s Income, of benefits sufficiently similar to enable them to be regarded as on the way to a Citizen’s Income, and of significant legislative attempts at Citizen’s Incomes. The book complements Basic Income Guarantee and Politics, edited by Richard Caputo and recently published by the same publisher, with which it overlaps to some extent, but not too much. Both books are essential reading for anyone interested in how experience of Citizen’s Income, and debate about it, are developing worldwide.
Some of the material in the first part of the book will be familiar to readers of this Newsletter, but some will not be. The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend will be well known, but less well known will be some highly positive results from United States and Canadian Negative Income Tax experiments. This Newsletter has already reported stunning results from the Namibian Citizen’s Income pilot project, but less well known are the complexities of Brazil’s and Canada’s political economies and their effects on benefit reform.
The second part of the book describes Basic Income proposals for East Timor, Catalonia, South Africa, Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. The overall impression is of a widespread global debate, different in different countries, but with lots of connections between the different national debates.
Murray’s concluding chapter is understandably effusive about the results of the Namibian pilot project, and about the brake on inequality provided by the Alaskan Permanent Fund Dividend. Conditional schemes, on the other hand, are found to lead to new inequalities (p.253), and tax credit and negative income tax schemes to have similar problems (p.255). Murray recognises the different effects of different political contexts, and this reviewer was particularly struck by ways in which more federal political arrangements, such as those in the USA and Brazil, can make the debate more possible locally but quite complex nationally.
One issue over which the editors seem to be somewhat confused is that of terminolog. In this book, ‘Basic Income’ usually means an unconditional and nonwithdrawable income for every citizen, but sometimes it means a class of benefit types of which an unconditional benefit is one member (e.g., p.251), which leaves the unconditional and universal benefit without a name. A similar problem arises in the introductory chapter, which lists some important questions: What form should the payment take? How much should it be? Should it be unconditional? Should it be universal? Can it be afforded? How should it be funded? Some of these questions are ‘controversial questions’ surrounding ‘Basic Income’ (p.2) if ‘Basic Income’ is understood as an unconditional, nonwithdrawable and universal income: but some are not. The question ‘Should the payment be universal?’ is a question about whether we should have a Basic Income. It is not a question about a Basic Income. Similarly, ‘Should the income be paid unconditionally?’ is a question about whether or not we should have a Basic Income. By the end of the introduction we are entirely unsure about what the term ‘Basic Income’ means.
I know that this has been said in these pages before, but it clearly needs saying again: clarity of definition is essential to rational debate.
Our position is this: A ‘Citizen’s Income’ or a ‘Basic Income’ is an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income for every individual as a right of citizenship. The terms should not be used for anything else. Other terms, such as ‘social dividend’ and ‘universal grant’ are equivalent, but only if they mean the same thing. (We do not use ‘Basic Income Guarantee’ because a guaranteed income can mean an income achieved by means-tested benefits.) Widespread agreement on the meaning of terminology would considerably help the clarity of debate, both individual national debates and the global debate, and it would have helped the editors and authors of the book under review to express themselves more clearly.
But having said all that: Murray and Pateman have provided us with a most useful collection of essays on some highly significant Citizen’s Income experiences and debates, and anyone interested in that debate should read this book.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 9, 2012 | News
On the 30th May 2012 the General Conference of the International Labour Organization reaffirmed that the right to social security is a human right and recommended that member countries should ‘establish and maintain … social protection floors … Schemes providing such benefits may include universal benefit schemes, social insurance schemes, social assistance schemes, negative income tax schemes, … .’
For more information see: www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—ed_norm/—relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_183326.pdf
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 26, 2012 | Research
This opinion piece argues that a BIG could almost erase poverty in Canada. It presents evidence from the Negative Income Tax experiments and from the history of the guaranteed income movement.
It’s online at:
https://thetyee.ca/News/2012/05/15/Guaranteed-Basic-Income/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=150512
by Karl Widerquist | Jun 25, 2012 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
The Eleventh North American Basic Income Guarantee (NA-BIG) Congress took place at the University of Toronto on May 3-5, 2012. I had the privilege of attending this conference. It provided an unusual opportunity for me to go to a NA-BIG Congress purely as a participant, because I had almost nothing to do with the organization of it this year.
The theme of the Congress was “Putting Equality Back on The Agenda: Basic Income and Other Approaches to Economic Security for All.” It began—unusually for a conference primarily dedicated to examining basic income—with two skeptics explaining what was wrong with the basic income as a solution to current problems in the United States and Canada. I applaud these participants for speaking their mind in an auditorium full of basic income supporters. It was kind of strange to begin with the skeptics—rebutting an idea that hadn’t yet been presented at the conference—but it worked very well to keep the basic income supporters on their toes throughout the conference.
The organizers invited two speakers to focus on the problems of poverty and inequality rather than specifically on basic income as a proposed solution: Charles Karelis (Research Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University and author of The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor) and Richard Wilkinson (Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School and co-author of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better). Even though these speakers’ remarks were not directly about basic income, they were valuable to the conference, because they show the need to do something about poverty and inequality in the world today. It’s the work of a conference like this to see if basic income can help solve the problems researchers like these have identified.
One featured speaker, Erik Olin Wright (of the Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, author of Envisioning Real Utopias, and American Society: How it Actually Works), brought the congress back to focus on basic income, but he did not support the common version of the basic income proposal—a basically unregulated economy with basic income as its one central progressive reform. He argued that basic income would only succeed if it were part of a major reform of the economic system.
One of the most pertinent presentations was given by Evelyn Forget (Professor, University of Manitoba Faculty of Medicine, author of a major forthcoming study on Mincome: the Manitoba minimum income experiment). She has been working for several years to recover and analyze data from the Canadian Negative Income Tax experiment, known as Mincome. The experiment was conducted by the Canadian Federal government in the late 1970s, but it was cancelled before the data was analyzed. Only now, thanks mostly to Evelyn Forget, are the findings of the experiment becoming fully available. She finds that the experiment had many benefits for recipients including, for example, improved school attainment among children and improved health outcomes for all family members.
Senator Art Eggleton, former mayor of Toronto, concluded the conference with a practical discussion of how to put BIG on the political agenda in North America.
The parallel sessions provided a wide range of discussion about BIG. These sessions were especially valuable for me because I was able to attend two sessions and a dinner dedicated to providing feedback to me on chapters of the book that I am currently polishing for publication. The book makes a freedom-based argument for an unconditional income from the perspective that the imposition of rules, including the rules of property, make the poor unfree in very important ways. Basic income is both compensation for the imposition of these rules and a necessary institution (in modern industrial society) to maintain each individual’s status as a free person with the power to accept or reject active cooperation with other willing individuals. The sessions I participated in helped me formulate this argument and to present the book as a work of political philosophy.
For me, the Congress was also an opportunity to reconnect with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. I have now been to six BIEN Congresses and all eleven NA-BIG Congresses. I believe there are only three of us who have been to all eleven Congresses (the other two being Jeff Smith and Al Sheahen). Every Congress is a little different. Some themes recur every time, but I’m always confronted with new ideas.
One welcome addition to this Congress was the presence of a significant number of people who are on disability or other forms of public assistance. This group brought the discussion back to practical issues every time, providing a skeptical view of nearly all the ideas presented. I hope we can get someone from this group to be a featured speaker at an upcoming NA-BIG or BIEN Congress.
The North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress is a joint project of the USBIG Network and the Canadian Basic Income Guarantee. It takes place in Canada and the United States on alternating years. Next year’s Congress will be in New York City in February (see announcement above).
For more information on this past conference go to:
https://biencanada.ca/
Papers from the Congress will be online as part of the USBIG Discussion Paper Series at:
https://www.usbig.net/papers.php
by Guest Contributor | Apr 2, 2012 | Opinion
Article by: Almaz Zelleke
The Cato Institute, a non-partisan Washington, D.C. think tank founded in 1977 to promote and disseminate libertarian views, is in danger. Due to a highly unusual and, in hindsight, highly unfortunate shareholder structure for a non-profit, it finds itself at risk of a hostile takeover by two of its co-founders, billionaire businessmen Charles and David Koch. Due to the death of one of the other two shareholders, the Kochs are poised to take control and shift Cato’s mission in a more partisan direction. Liberals and libertarians alike should rue the loss of Cato’s principled, non-partisan voice. Many of Cato’s free-market stands are certainly shared by Republicans, but it routinely ridicules Republican politicians who talk about cutting government spending while voting to increase it, opposes Republican warmongering, and is at odds with most of the party’s positions on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But the devolution of a libertarian think tank into one more concerned with protecting big business interests like the Kochs’ shouldn’t come as a surprise, despite the unusual circumstances in this case. Libertarianism has always had a latent conservatism due to its advocacy of absolute property rights. Absolute property rights inevitably concentrate economic power, which is why property rights in capitalist economies must be tempered by some redistributive force—welfare state institutions, redistributive taxes, or progressive resource dividends. Libertarians typically justify the inequalities generated by absolute property rights by the economic benefits they provide to all, including those without property. Even when this is demonstrably false—as it is today for the 46 million Americans who live in poverty in the richest country in the world—libertarians are at best grudging supporters of even market-friendly redistributive measures like a negative income tax or a basic income.
Liberalism emerged in the 18th century with the assertion of universal rights of sovereignty against absolute monarchs, but extensions of liberty beyond propertied men were only slowly and grudgingly granted. Liberal democracies granted full political rights to all only in the 20th century; full economic rights—always central to the liberal ideal—remain the privilege of the few. Libertarianism’s latent economic conservatism—conservative in the worst sense, in protecting existing privilege—has always lurked just below the surface. It’s no surprise that the Kochs, who were probably only millionaires when they co-founded Cato in the 1970s, should want their think tank to skew conservative now that they’re billionaires with a lot more to protect from free market competition.
