by Guest Contributor | Feb 17, 2016 | News
The Globe and Mail, Canada’s main centrist newspaper, reported on Friday 5 February 2016 that a federal government minister “is interested in the idea of a guaranteed [minimum] income.” Mr. Jean-Yves Duclos, the new Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, said, “I’m personally pleased that people are interested in the idea.” Mr. Duclos has a mandate to develop a federal poverty-reduction strategy.
Mr. Duclos is part of the Liberal Party of Canada, which won a parliamentary majority in the October 2015 federal election. The Liberal Party’s progressive electoral platform enabled the party to replace the Conservative party on the left and win many seats previously held by the New Democratic Party (Canada’s social democratic party) on the left. Key election promises included deficit spending to stimulate economic growth, the legalization of marijuana, electoral reform, a concerted effort to tackle climate change and a comprehensive national poverty-reduction strategy. Their strong parliamentary majority has given the party a clear mandate to pursue this progressive agenda in earnest.
However, although efforts to reduce poverty feature prominently in the official Liberal platform, a guaranteed minimum income did not. It is therefore unlikely to form part of Mr. Duclos’ national poverty-reduction strategy during the government’s current four-year term. Nevertheless, The Globe and Mail suggests that Mr. Duclos’ comments could lead to the idea’s inclusion in a future Liberal Party election manifesto. His comments would also seem to have substantial support among Liberal Party members with the 2014 Liberal Party Convention producing two major policy resolutions on a basic income.
Furthermore, the introduction of a federal guaranteed minimum income might not be such a difficult sell with Canada’s provincial governments, all of which would have to participate in such an initiative. It was announced in January 2016 that Mr. François Blais, Québec’s new Minister of Employment and Social Solidarity, will work towards introducing a provincial guaranteed minimum income. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party of Manitoba has pledged to introduce two guaranteed minimum income pilot projects if the party wins the provincial elections in April 2016.
Written by: Jon West
For more details on this story see:
Bill Curry, “Guaranteed income has merit as a national policy, minister says,” The Globe and Mail. February 5, 2016.
Credit picture CC UNU-WIDER
by Toru Yamamori | Feb 6, 2016 | News
Sir Christopher Pissarides, a Nobel prize-winning economist and the Regius professor at London School of Economics, expressed his support for a universal basic income, at one of the debate sessions of the World Economic Forum at Davos, on 20th January 2016.
Professor Pissarides said:
The pie is growing bigger, there is no guarantee that everyone will benefit if we leave the market alone. In fact, if anything, we think that not everyone will benefit if we leave the market alone. So we need to develop a new system of redistributions, new policies that will redistribute inevitably from those that the market would have rewarded in favour of those that the market would have left behind. Now, having a universal minimum income is one of those ways, in fact, it is one I am very much in favour of, as long as we know how to apply it without taking away incentive to work at the lower end of the market.
[Transcribed by Toru Yamamori from the video. Any inaccuracy belongs to him.]
The session ‘A World Without Work’ was held in partnership with NHK, the Japanese national broadcasting agency. In addition to Pissarides, participants included:
- Erik Brynjolfsson, Director, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, MIT – Sloan School of Management, USA
- Yoshiaki Fujimori, President and Chief Executive Officer, LIXIL Group, Japan
- Dileep George, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Vicarious, USA
- Troels Lund Poulsen, Minister for Business and Growth of Denmark
The session was moderated by Hiroko Kuniya, an anchor for NHK and other speakers also discussed basic income. You can watch the highlights form the panel here:
The full session can be viewed online:
“World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: A World Without Work?” World Economic Forum. 20 January 2016.
“Davos 2016 – A World Without Work?” YouTube, 20 January 2016.
by Tyler Prochazka | Jan 28, 2016 | News
One of the persistent criticisms of the Universal Basic Income is that it would either entice people to purchase addictive substances, such as alcohol, or enable existing addictions through the added cash benefit. Dr. Katarzyna Gajewska, an independent scholar researching the UBI, has studied this question in the past. Her unique insights deserve further exploration. I recently had the opportunity to interview Katarzyna on the subject.
In the interview, Katarzyna discussed her conclusion that it is “improbable” that a UBI would cause someone to become an addict. She believes that “abrupt measures,” such as taking away an individual’s basic income, should not be how the state manages addictions; instead, the state should find ways to “protect” them from spending their income on addictive substances. This could mean funding more places that provide help for those struggling with addiction, like the services at ARC Rehab for example.
In order to win the political argument, Katarzyna said it is important that the UBI movement advance a “human argument,”. According to her, “the more we de-mystify and understand the unemployed and addicted by telling their stories, the more empathy will be created.”
Katarzyna also believes that the UBI movement should place greater emphasis on how a UBI would transform society:
One can think of the basic income project as a way of transforming culture and daily practices by exiting the competition and alienation that employment system boosts.
If one is liberated from addictions and non-meaningful consumption, basic income could make it possible to engage in the projects that one finds worth pursuing and bring joy into working together.
The entirety of my email interview with Gajewska is reproduced below. Some sections were slightly modified for clarity.
1. A World Bank study found that in Latin America, Asia and Africa cash transfers had little impact on “temptation goods,” such as alcohol. Do you think these findings are applicable to Western countries as well, or what are the limits from this type of study?
Definitely, it is a research question to pursue. The Finnish experimental study on basic income that is about to be produced or the Dutch experiment in the city of Utrecht could be an interesting opportunity to generate several PhD projects on such a question. I would go for a meticulous sampling of addicted (or prone to addiction) individuals with basic income, including as much diversity of individuals as possible in terms of variables like demographic, job history, and variables relevant to addiction. Such a study could be an opportunity to gather a lot of qualitative data and get a new understanding about the relation between income and addiction. The research would reveal whether the UBI contributes to or rescues individuals from addiction, and under what conditions. It seems improbable to me that one would fall into an addiction because of the UBI. A healthy, emotionally fit individual would not be tempted by an excessive substance use in the first place. However, one can address this question in the general survey. Revealing the influence of monetary allowance on addiction (positive or negative), while taking into account other contributors to addiction, would be an important finding to inform social policy makers. Instead of deciding in favor or against a UBI, further adjustments informed by experimental research need to be formulated.
2. How should a basic income scheme handle relatively extreme instances of alcohol and drug addiction? That is, is there a point when the state should intervene and remove an individual’s basic income for undesirable behavior, even if it only causes individual harm?
With or without a basic income scheme, the state should prevent further individual harm by providing therapy measures. Depriving an addict of subsistence may lead to a criminal behaviour, harming family members or friends. A person in an advanced stage of addiction will find all possible means to get a fix while remaining in denial of the addiction. So the costs may become much higher than providing the addict with therapy. Instead of employing someone to detect who is an addict in order to deprive them of their basic income, the state could make a better use of this money and invest in therapists that specialist in addiction. Additionally, there is a whole problem of defining at what stage the addiction justifies such a decision and the administrative procedures involved in it. A more constructive measure would be to offer psychological therapy and organize addicts in work collectives within subsidized enterprises as Johann Hari reports was done in Portugal. Furthermore, physiological deregulation needs to be accompanied by therapy. I have heard of a foundation in Budapest that accompanied addicts with massage therapy. Instead of withholding subsistence means from an addict, one could think of protecting an addicted individual from spending all their income on the addiction. Such measures can include public housing and other basic services such as going to somewhere like this drug rehab in New Jersey, or one that is closer to home.
However, financial resources are relatively irrelevant in pursuing addictive behaviour. In France, a woman who held a high position in a big company became an alcoholic. Alcohol use was widely accepted and even promoted in this male-dominated environment. Once she fainted because of alcohol overuse. Then she got fired and company management informed her that her problem was widely known within the company for quite some time. No one in the company had talked to her about it. She stopped drinking and wrote a book. A person in such a position has probably enough savings not to worry for a while, so it was not the fact of losing money that made her stop in the first place. What protects an alcoholic’s self-illusion is the taboo culture around addiction and others’ fear of confronting the addict about it.
In developed countries where social networks are very loose, it would be difficult to recreate such a structure of belonging to a group that would motivate an isolated addicted person to undergo treatment. It is recommended that alcoholics seek support and treatment from somewhere like DayHab alcohol rehab. In the research on addiction, this is one of the theories that the lack of deep social ties boosts a withdrawal into addictive behaviours. So instead of “healing” an addiction with punishment, social policy needs to take into account the basic human need of belonging to a community. Bruce Alexander, the author of Rat Park experiment that demonstrated the impact of the social isolation on addiction, identifies the main reason for addiction in dislocation, which he defines in the following way: “On a social level it is the absence of enduring and sustaining connections between individuals and their families and/or local societies, nations, traditions, and natural environments. In existential terms, it is the absence of vital feelings of belonging, identity, meaning, and purpose.” While recovery movements addressed this void by creating local initiatives to help people create new ties and feel more integrated, Alexander considers that this is not enough a remedy and advocates transforming the entire society to prevent the conditions that bring isolation and the lack of meaning that push people into addiction.
Addiction poses an enormous challenge on policy makers, us individually and as a society. Taking away an income, or considering that the state should take care of the money is searching an easy way out that turns against us in the long run. Punishment is a sign of hopelessness and helplessness. To question this policy, it is essential to reconnect to our emotions – to understand why punishment appears as the sole solution. Anyone who has had an opportunity to talk to an addicted person, as I have several times, knows how emotionally draining and painful it is to see an addict. Personally, when walking through a town, I would not give money to a person that is obviously going to use it on addictive substances. I look away because I feel powerless. We do it individually and we do it as a society. This is probably why the political solution easiest to envision is not to see it, not to address it, or address it with abrupt measures such as withdrawing income. UBI movement needs to address this reticence that probably is common to many potential supporters.
3. You mentioned there needs to be a “broader vision and a movement needs to stand behind the UBI”. Can you elaborate on this point?
This is my criticism of the UBI movement. We are a movement of many visions and versions of a UBI. This deters potential supporters. For example, during citizen debates I participated in here in France, sometimes we find ourselves not knowing which proposition we are talking about. I believe that it is a high time to elaborate a vision not only of giving people money but also the transformation that we want to achieve by it. For example, the p2p, Transition Towns, and de-growth movements* could join forces together with (at least some parts of) the basic income movement. The vision to elaborate would be less about the logistical and technological solutions and more about the transformation of human relations, organizational structures and dynamics, the trade relations between Western consumers and workers in developing countries, and individuals’ lifestyles. In all of this, the way of organizing production and consumption is crucial. I do not think that giving people money so that they can pursue their shopping addictions, buying imported cheap stuff produced by exploited workers and with high environmental costs, is a political project that can motivate enough people. The capitalist system generates a set of conditionings. We need to heal our relation to work and consumption (including addictive forms of consumption) so that work is a source of meaning and belonging. One can think of the basic income project as a way of transforming culture and daily practices by exiting the competition and alienation that the employment system boosts. If one is liberated from addictions and non-meaningful consumption, basic income could make it possible to engage in the projects that one finds worth pursuing and bring joy into working together. Starting from there, a less consumerist and more communal lifestyle could develop. Western civilization has advanced so much in technology and so little in community living and emotional healing.
To advance the UBI proposal, the movement needs to give a taste of this transformation. Create stories and enact this new way of being together. There are already such examples in place: Rainbow Gatherings are a way of enacting a different way of being together; Occupy Wall Street experimented with organizing logistics; intentional communities generate a new way of living together. Another such example is a free cafeteria, People’s Potato at Concordia University in Montréal where volunteers can drop in and contribute their work. In the interviews I have conducted, some pointed to the integration and breaking of isolation that this project induces. Multiplying experiments of living without conditions and questioning other capitalist premises could become the movement’s agenda. And through these experiments, activists can touch the deeper questions like the healing of addictions and the reflection on the policies and organizational structures that should accompany the introduction of a UBI. Many people in the movement see the potential that would be liberated and the new cultural shift thanks to a UBI, but we can already begin working on this new culture and accelerate the realization of the UBI implementation as a result.
4. Even if evidence suggests the basic income would not have a significant impact on undesirable behavior, the fact that some individuals may abuse the system is a political liability. How does the basic income movement win the political argument?
The argument for or against a basic income (one that effectively liberates citizens from the necessity to be employed to have a decent life standard) is a debate about human nature. So the movement needs to focus on confronting people with the image of human nature they hold and where it comes from. The movement’s strategy should be to help individuals arrive at a deeper understanding of such judgements. The debate needs to be informed by research findings on trauma therapy, addiction, and epigenetics. Bringing scientists from these disciplines on board would be a great strategic choice. When engaging with the political process, the movement should come up with additional research-informed measures to accompany the UBI. The winning argument would be a more specific proposal of the reform to be introduced.
It would be great to mobilize money for academic research, future empirically and qualitatively informed research studies. A senior researcher would need to be enchanted by the idea. Applying the case study method, scientific inquiry should select individuals facing unemployment stigma, addiction, or other difficulties in the Western context. Research funding could be allocated as a UBI to several well selected individuals to study their behaviour under this condition and test other conditions such as basic income combined with therapy.
There are these crowd-funded basic income projects: one in Germany and other for Scott Santens in the US. These are great projects, but why not bring the idea to the next level and allocate such an allowance to a typical “strawman” or scapegoat in the debate who has not even heard of a basic income before? Great material for a documentary. This would also be an occasion to explore the idea of unconditionality and trust. These are the psychological and cultural preconditions to implementing a UBI.
People tend to consider political attitudes or support for a reform as an effect of logical-rational reasoning, so one searches for an argument. But there is some scientific evidence that emotions define our “rational” decisions. So more work needs to be done at this level instead of winning any argument. My take on the reason why the gay movement has experienced many successes is not political process or winning an argument but cultural shift within the society. Gay people came out and took pride in who they are. And they were visible in our friend’s circles and among work colleagues. The same can apply for the strategy for UBI. The more we de-mystify and understand the unemployed and addicted by telling their stories, the more empathy will be created. We should work more on the human argument, the emotional side of it. Like with gay rights, the UBI may be supported by a silent not mobilized majority.
5. Any other important comments?
It is very important to address this question and to learn more about it within the movement. To arrive at any substantial change, we need to meet people at where they are, address their fears. And this requires a better understanding of addiction and healing. Also the problem of alcoholism and addiction is not well understood in our society. By remaining silent about it, we deprive the affected and their close circle from taking action. Media outlets have a role to play. Thank you for bringing it up!
Katarzyna Gajewska (PhD) has contributed, among other publications, articles on unconditional basic income and alternative ways of organizing production. You can find her non-academic writing on such platforms as Occupy.com, P2P Foundation Blog, Basic Income UK, and LeftEast. For updates on her publications, you can check her Facebook page or write to her to get updates by e-mail: k.gajewska_comm AT zoho.com.
by Nicole Teke | Jan 13, 2016 | News
Socialist Member of Parliament and former Minister Delphine Batho just tabled an amendment to the National Assembly asking the government to make a report on the feasibility of basic income in the context of digital revolution.
Update 18th January: MP Frédéric Lefebvre and several conservatives colleagues have tabled another amendment with the same wording.
Basic income is slowly but surely entering the political scene. On January 11th 2016, Delphine Batho, MP from the Socialist Party and former Minister of Justice and Ecology, submitted an amendment to a bill on digital technology, asking the government to make a report on different approaches to basic income and its economic feasibility.
This amendment (pdf) calls for a detailed report on this topic by no later than June 2016, which would include “a macro-economic feasibility study, a comparative impact study on different approaches to basic income, as well as an analysis on the experiments on the subject that are currently going on, on a local and an international scale”.
This interesting move happened only few days after an important report submitted to the Ministry for Employment made an important case for basic income. As part of 20 recommendations presented to the Ministry, the report recommended studying the feasibility of basic income in France by carrying out a study, in order to plan pilot-projects in the country. It created a lot of ripples in the media and Ms Batho’s amendment directly refers to it.
The French Movement for a Basic Income (MFRB) supports Delphine Batho’s initiative and calls for broad and cross-party support for it.
Mrs Batho’s support for basic income is not new. In a colloquium organized in the Senate in May 2015, she defended the idea, stating that “our welfare and State-financed system relies on 1945 capitalism and the thirty years of post-war economic growth. We now live in a different era and the system is now subject to changes, due more specifically to this new digital era, but also to the ecological crisis, the depletion of natural resources, etc. We thus need to think about a new organizational and welfare system”.
The Socialist MP emphasized the importance of studying the possibility of a basic income in France, in a context where it could “remunerate ‘unpaid work’ and all tasks that create value, especially through digital tools”. She based her arguments on the “digital revolution and the changes it implies for the labour market”, as new technologies contribute to doing more and more tasks, and consequently replace more and more jobs in France and worldwide.
This new development is the latest in a series of positive signals for basic income in France. Last month in the Aquitaine Region, the left coalition won the election with a proposal for a basic income pilot in their platform, and last November a right-wing MP Frédéric Lefebvre unsuccessfully proposed a similar amendment in another legislative dossier.
Last but not least, MP Lefebvre revealed on twitter this week that he has had a discussion with the Minister of the Economy Emmanuel Macron, and the latter agreed to work on basic income.
On the down side, a new poll shows that only 35% of the French would support basic income. This is a lower score than a previous poll in May 2015 (60% in favour). However this may be explained by the different way of presenting the idea to respondents.
This could thus be a turning point for basic income in France, as more and more decision-makers show an interest in the issue.
Credit picture CC Parti socialiste
by Timothy Roscoe Carter | Jan 9, 2016 | Opinion
Before beginning this essay, let me describe the people about whom I am speaking when I use the term “liberal”. In the American 21st century context, I am essentially describing the people you would likely find in the leadership of the Democratic party. Despite the conservative view of mainstream liberals as radical socialists, they are, at most, cautious reformers. Even that probably goes too far. The way they depict themselves, and probably actually see themselves, is as people who believe in the system, but want it to be fairer, more compassionate, and more efficient. When viewed systematically, the most important of those is efficiency. A look at policy reveals that the primary aim of liberals is using the government to make capitalism work better and more efficiently. This also applies to seemingly non-market concerns like welfare benefits, civil rights, and education.
Let us look at equal pay and anti-discrimination labor laws for women. Some economic theorists on the right argue that such laws are unnecessary. According to them, the market would automatically correct any form of discrimination. If sexist employers refused to hire women or paid them significantly less than their equally skilled male counterparts, other employers would exploit the opportunity to hire the women at higher wages. The productivity gains of the fairer employers would lead to emulation and competition for women workers until parity with men is achieved.
Liberals usually respond by appealing to empirical reality. If this argument were true today, it would have also been true in 1910. We know there was sex discrimination then, as there continues to be today. If markets corrected inefficiencies by themselves, there would never have been any gender discrimination. But liberal arguments do not contradict the claim that sex discrimination is inefficient. Laws preventing gender discrimination may be just and compassionate, but they also make markets work more efficiently. Eventually, laws against gender discrimination turned out to benefit employers as much as they benefited women. In the documentary Inequality For All, Robert Reich showed that employers took advantage of the growing numbers of women in the workforce competing with men for the same jobs, and this was one of the factors that eventually lead to the leveling off of real wage growth that began in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s .
This analysis applies across the range of policies pushed by liberals. Consumer protection laws and tort laws may protect and compensate consumers, but they also encourage trade by making it easier to trust strangers in the market. Public health care and education saves and enriches people’s lives, but they also produce a skilled and healthy workforce for employers. Laws that support strong unions help the workers themselves, but they also increase workers’ wages so that they can spend more as consumers. Infrastructure projects provide public goods that are used by all, but they notoriously prioritize the needs of businesses over the needs of the disadvantaged communities where they are inevitably built.
What about same-sex marriage? It is crucial for social justice, but does it help market efficiency to allow people to marry whom they wish? No, it does not, and that is why same-sex marriage provides a useful counter-example. The fact is that same-sex marriage was never really a mainstream liberal goal. Nor was it really a goal of the large mainstream gay rights organizations. The main goal was just for more acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. If straight people can partake in hookup culture on apps like Tinder then why can’t gay people go on Discreet Gay Dating without being judged for it? If dysfunctional heterosexual couples can have a baby why can’t stable same-sex couples adopt one? Both the politicians and the organizations focused on the acceptances of the community and getting anti-discrimination laws passed, which do serve market efficiency as previously noted. Same-sex marriage as a goal arose from the gay and lesbian grass roots and was pursued more through the courts than through legislation. As late as 2008, all three top contenders for the Democratic nomination for President declared their opposition to same-sex marriage. The speed and enthusiasm with which virtually all of the top Democrats reversed their positions the moment same-sex marriage polled over 50% could certainly cause a person to doubt the sincerity of their previous opposition. But to blame that insincere opposition on political cowardice would be to miss the point. Professional politicians fight uphill battles against initial public opposition a lot. But they also have to pick their battles. And however much powerful liberals may have secretly sympathized with the plight of their gay and lesbian friends who wished to marry, and may have even supported them with donations towards items to help them consumate such a marriage (be it a feeldoe or helping with the ceremony itself), they were simply not going to prioritize a political battle for social justice that would not increase market efficiency, grow the economy, and enrich their campaign donors.
So where does this leave us with basic income? To answer this, we need to examine how liberals approach welfare in general. It is certainly true that they support much more generous benefits than conservatives, they also tend to be even more concerned with separating the deserving poor from the undeserving poor than conservatives, whose main concern is turning whatever welfare spending that does exist into a way to funnel that money into corporate coffers. Liberals usually support robust Earned Income Credits, a kind of negative income tax limited to low wage earners, dropping off quickly above the poverty line. They support benefits for children and the elderly as well as the disabled, although they can be extremely strict about whom they consider disabled. They will give welfare benefits to unemployed single parents sparingly, on a temporary basis, and require education or employment search conditions designed to get the parents back to work as soon as possible. Drug and alcohol abuse are seen as reasons to cut off benefits. For unemployed working age adults, liberals sponsor “Care Not Cash” initiatives, which replace cash benefits with direct services, in the few localities that offer any benefits at all.
The pattern is clear: liberals believe that humans have value primarily as engines of production and consumption. Within this view, welfare is a legitimate tool to push people into the labor market. This ensures that goods and services can be produced. Those who do work and those incapable of working are to be given a sufficient income to take them slightly above the poverty line. This appears compassionate, but the systemic reason is to ensure that they have just enough money that they spend all of it. This way there is sufficient demand for goods and services to be produced, but people can not save enough money to become capitalists or be able to leave the workforce. Indeed, virtually all public assistance programs cut off recipients with any significant savings. While conservatives fight for the direct interests of the capitalist class, liberals fight for the interests of the capitalist system.
I understand that few liberals consciously believe and support the goals and beliefs which I ascribe to them here. They believe they are compassionate people who want to make the system work better for the unfortunate. That is probably true. But it does not matter. Like with institutional racism, the conscious intent of the participants does not matter; it is their actions and the results that matter. And the fact is, if you assume that the primary concern of liberals is market efficiency, you will predict their actions better than if you assume that their primary concern is uplifting the downtrodden or achieving economic and social justice.
Let us look at one more example before we turn to basic income: the minimum wage. One obvious way that the minimum wage fits the pattern I have described is that you have to be employed to benefit from it. A less obvious way is that it looks free, but it is actually a tax that is passed on to consumers, so it is the middle class that pays for it, not the capitalist class.
But the most striking way that the minimum wage fits this pattern is when you look at its amount. Democrats pick a new number every seven to twelve years. They refuse to index it to inflation so they can have at least one winning issue against Republicans every decade. Opponents of raising the minimum wage always mock the arbitrary nature of the new number picked and ask something like, “Why not $100 per hour?” Liberals typically dismiss this mockery with empirical evidence, pointing out that raising the minimum wage has almost never resulted in a loss of jobs, and sometimes results in increased employment due to increased demand.
But as with anti-discrimination laws, just because right-wing critics are empirically wrong does not mean that they do not have a point. What criteria do liberals use to determine how much the minimum wage should be? $100 per hour likely would wreck the economy. But if $10.10 per hour, the current consensus goal of the Democratic Party, would have no ill effects, why not fight for $15, or $20, or $25? Why not commission a study to determine the maximum sustainable minimum wage? Applying the principle that liberals are working to support the capitalist system, we can see where they get their numbers. Liberals pick a minimum wage that puts workers near the edge of the poverty line, where they can be good consumers but never save enough to exit the workforce.
So what can we expect from liberals in the fight for a basic income?
We can start with two broadly optimistic points. First, since liberals are concerned with efficiency, evidence can sway them, and the scientific and empirical evidence is strong that a basic income is cheaper to administer, raises health and education outcomes, and does not cause people to quit working and live an idle life. Masses of healthy and educated people working and spending money churns the economy, and this is good for the capitalist system.
Second, liberals will join the basic income cause with little hesitation when the technological unemployment crisis starts receiving mainstream media attention. While liberals will tolerate significant unemployment because it keeps down labor costs, they will see too large a number of unemployed as wasted potential consumers. This will be especially true if more workers are not actually needed to produce the goods and services that the unemployed could otherwise buy.
Now the caveats.
Let me start off with a particularly American concern. Despite the significant libertarian origins of and current support for a basic income, many people hear the idea of the government giving everyone free money and they think, “socialism”. And in America, this is a problem. Despite the good arguments that could be made that the United States in the 1950s and 1960s had the most socialist economy that has ever existed in human history, America during the Cold War defined itself in opposition to “socialism”. For many, fear of the label has stuck. Conservatives still use “socialism” as an epithet for economic policies they oppose, and many liberals will do or say whatever is necessary to avoid being associated with socialism. If you ask prominent liberals, they will point to surveys showing the unpopularity of socialism in America. This could be a chicken and egg problem: why should most Americans not be afraid of socialism if even liberal leaders oppose it? Fortunately, this also appears to be a generational problem that is going away. Recent surveys of Americans under 30 show support for socialism to be equal to support for capitalism, and the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders may be showing that fear of the label “socialism” is overblown.
The next problem with liberals will be to educate them. The facts being on our side will not help if establishment liberals do not know them. The specific problem here is that the misrepresentations of the work participation and family stability effects of the Negative Income Tax experiments that were spread in the mid 1970s are still believed by many establishment liberals. We will have to work hard to correct those misbeliefs.
Another problem will be that if technological unemployment does not reach a crisis point, liberals will simply not prioritize basic income on their own. They will have to be dragged into taking action by political pressure. This will be similar to the example of same-sex marriage, except that instead of claiming opposition up until the public changes its mind, look for liberals to vocalize general support for the concept of a basic income, but not do anything about it. An example of this strategy was how, in the years following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a lot of politicians of all stripes, including President Bush, voiced support for setting up an Alaska style trust fund to pay oil dividends to all Iraqis, but it never happened. This will be because, even if liberals come to agree that a basic income would be a better policy than the current welfare system, the efficiency benefits to the capitalist system are not great enough to put it on their priority list. Just as the suffering of gays and lesbians who wanted to marry was not sufficient cause to make same-sex marriage a priority, neither is the suffering of the poor. It never has been in the past. Again, this will change when technological unemployment becomes a crisis, and there will not be enough consumers to buy goods and services without a basic income.
The final, and biggest challenge with liberals as allies will be their attempts to dilute the idea of a basic income. While they may become far more generous with the cash amounts, it will be difficult for them not to attach strings and conditions. The reason is that it will be difficult to change their belief that they know how to run the lives of the poor better than the poor themselves. But a bigger danger is that they will try to insist on means-testing. They will try to make the middle-class believe that means-testing will make it cheaper for them. The reality is that means-testing will make the financial burden of a minimum income fall on the middle-classes. This, again, is because the goal for liberals is not economic justice, but making the current capitalist system run better.
In order to relieve the immediate suffering of the poor and establish the principle that poverty is not tolerated in our society, it may be necessary to agree to means-testing to pass an initial guaranteed minimum income. Liberals will trumpet that the job is done. Those of us who count justice as one of our goals need to be prepared to continue the fight.
