by Kate McFarland | Dec 13, 2016 | Opinion, Testimonies
This year, BIEN celebrated its 30th anniversary. An event commemorating the occasion was held at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium on October 1, in connection also with the 25th anniversary of UCLouvain’s Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics and the retirement of BIEN cofounder Philippe van Parijs as its director.
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Philippe Van Parijs about the past, present, and future of BIEN.
What’s the most striking difference between BIEN’s earlier years and now?
Participants in BIEN’s founding meeting
The internet. It is hard for young people today to imagine what it meant to run an international network when all communication between its members had to happen through the post. The newsletter needed to be typed, then printed, then photocopied, then stapled. Each copy of the newsletter then had to be inserted in a big envelope, with a stamp stuck on it, and the whole lot had to be taken to the nearest post box. All this cost money. So, annual fees had to be collected. But bank charges were high for international transfers and would have absorbed half of these fees. We therefore asked people to send the money to Louvain-la-Neuve in an envelope in pesetas, deutsche Mark, French Francs, lire, etc. and I changed them at the bank before paying equivalent amounts in Belgian Francs into BIEN’s bank account. We more or less managed three issues per year, but given the time this cost to a tiny number of busy people, this was a recurrent miracle. To lighten the thankless burden of fee collection, we wisely switched in the late nineties to a life membership formula. And from 2000, thanks to increasing access to internet among BIEN’s members, we allowed ourselves to gradually switch from the tri-annual printed newsletter to more frequent e-mailed news flashes.
What were BIEN’s most memorable successes in its first 30 years?
The greatest success — and the first virtue of a good network — is simply to have kept going, with a newsletter sharing intelligible and trustworthy information every few months and with a congress unfailingly organized every two years. These congresses enabled a core of highly committed people to get to know each other personally, to inform, encourage and inspire each other, but proved also a powerful instrument for making more people aware of the idea of basic income and ready to take it seriously. The first two conferences (in Louvain-la-Neuve in 1986 and Antwerp 1988) were very modest, low-budget events. The first grand congress was organized by Edwin Morley-Fletcher, with the support of Italy’s Lega Nazionale delle Cooperative e Mutue at the European University Institute (Florence) in September 1990. I thought at the time that organizing such big and expensive events would be unsustainable. But I was proved wrong by a long and so far uninterrupted succession of enthusiastic conference organizers.
Eduardo Suplicy (CC BY 2.0 Senado Federal)
The second greatest success — and the second virtue of a good network — is to have kept expanding. As time went on, more and more people from outside Europe attended BIEN’s congresses. Among them, Brazilian Senator Eduardo Suplicy, who started suggesting, from 1998 onwards, that the Basic Income European Network should become the Basic Income Earth Network. Guy Standing was sympathetic to the suggestion from the start. I was very skeptical at first, partly because I knew too well how hard it had been to keep our little European network going, and partly because I thought that a broad interest in basic income could only arise in countries that experienced for a sufficiently long time the perverse effects of conditional income schemes. But by 2004, 25 percent of BIEN’s life members were from outside Europe. Moreover, in January 2004, Eduardo managed to get President Lula to sign his “basic income law”. And the internet was conquering the world. My resistance evaporated. At the Barcelona congress, in September 2004, the General Assembly approved our proposal to make BIEN a worldwide network.
Can these greatest successes be called memorable? Not really. A network acts discreetly in the background. It empowers its components, thereby helping them do a number of things, including memorable ones. Would there have been a basic income law in Brazil or a basic income referendum in Switzerland in the absence of the slow maturing and dissemination of the idea made possible by the existence of a lasting and expanding network? And would they stick as firmly in many people’s memories without an efficient and influential network that confers them a memorable rather than anecdotal status?
Can these greatest successes be called memorable? Not really. A network acts discreetly in the background.
What have been the biggest challenges?
Apart from the material concerns already mentioned, I can think of two main challenges. One is linguistic. Opting for English as the sole language of a European network was far less obvious thirty years ago than it has now become. There were voices rightly pointing out the elitism involved in this choice. In most countries, only bilinguals (or more) could be involved. Yet, given the resources available, only the monolingual formula was realistic. Consequently, a constant effort was required, far from fully successful, to correct the imbalance thereby created along many dimensions: from the overrepresentation of news and publications from Anglophone countries to the overrepresentation of Anglophones among active participants in our congresses or assemblies.
The other challenge is sectarianism. When people sharing the same conviction form an association, there is a danger that their meetings and publications will largely reduce to a rehearsal of the common faith and a denunciation of the stupidity or wickedness of those who don’t share it. It has been crucial to the vitality and impact of BIEN that it has resisted such sectarian degeneration. It has kept inviting to its congresses speakers who spoke against basic income. It has kept reporting in a fair way on criticisms and setbacks. And it has kept insisting that its membership is open to people “committed to or interested in” an unconditional basic income in a precise yet broad sense that does not stipulate a specific funding method, rationale, level or set of accompanying measures.
Has BIEN ever run the risk of dying?
Twice, I think. First, it could have been still-born. Driven by the pioneers’ enthusiasm, the initial plan, at the September 1986 founding conference, was to hold a conference every year, and someone offered to hold the next one in Maastricht in September 1987. But the proposal fell through and instead there followed a long silence. It is only in February 1988 that BIEN’s first newsletter was sent out, announcing a second conference, which Walter Van Trier, BIEN’s first secretary, managed to put together in Antwerp, in September 1988.
The second time agony seemed close was in the mid-nineties. With my four children, Louvain’s Hoover Chair to run and my Real Freedom for All nearing completion, I was struggling to combine the jobs of BIEN secretary and newsletter editor. To my great relief, at the London 1994 congress, a founding member who was hardly involved until then agreed to become the newsletter editor. I still dealt with the first issue following the congress, but thereafter, despite many reminders and repeated promises, nothing happened for many months. I took back the editor job and laboriously published a treble Christmas 1995 issue, after a full year gap. It made me realize both how crucial a newsletter is to the very existence of a network and how important it is for the sustainability of a network that people should only commit to what they are really able to do.
Philippe Van Parijs (photo credit: Enno Schmidt)
What do you see as BIEN’s biggest challenges moving forward?
One big challenge is to keep track of the countless fast swelling stream of relevant developments worldwide and to make their nature and significance intelligible to people across the world. Internet is no doubt a fabulous asset for a worldwide network. But working out the right hierarchy, in terms of relevance, significance and reliability, among the mass of information to which we now have easy access is both essential and difficult. BIEN’s current team is doing a terrific job in this respect.
Another challenge is to constantly find the right balance between utopianism and pragmatism, between on the one hand an attractive, stirring vision of a better world that can boost our hopes and stimulate our actions and on the other an acute, clear-headed awareness of difficulties, obstacles, defeats and disappointments.
What do you see as most exciting?
The fact that so many different people in such different countries discover, discuss and appropriate the idea and that this helps them regain the hope they had lost in a better future for themselves and for their children.
Philippe Van Parijs has been chair of BIEN’s international board since 2004. He was the organizer of BIEN’s founding conference (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986), BIEN’s newsletter editor from 1988 to 2004, BIEN’s secretary from 1994 to 2004. He is the author (with Yannick Vanderborght) of Basic Income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy, Harvard University Press, Spring 2017.
Cover Photo: Van Parijs at BIEN’s 30th Anniversary event (credit: Enno Schmidt).
by Guest Contributor | Dec 8, 2016 | Opinion
Written By: Pierre Madden
It is Voltaire who quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. I am convinced that Basic Income will be implemented in the next decade. By its definition, BI is universal, individual and unconditional. However, none of these features will be a part of BI as it first materializes.
A universal demogrant is just too expensive to contemplate, except in Alaska where oil revenue is distributed to every man, woman and child. Giving the same amount to everybody only to claw it back in taxes from most, while philosophically pure, flies in the face of common sense. That is why all serious proposals are structured as a negative income tax (NIT). In fact, there are already features in the Canadian federal and provincial fiscal systems that function as NIT with regular cash transfers.
The basic unit in our society is the family. Statistics are kept by households. An individual is no more than a couple divided by the square root of two. This is in part just the common-sense recognition of the economies of scale of collective living. It is not four times as expensive to live as a family of four than to live alone, only two times (i.e.: cost of living alone times the square root of four). In Québec, two individuals sharing an apartment would each receive $623 per month for a total of $1,246. At some point, the government will consider them to be living in a “common law marriage” and cut the benefits to $965 in total (the government does not follow the square root rule). The fact that you do not sleep together or that you are siblings is not a defence. Across the board individuality would raise the problem of “the banker’s wife.” The banker is very rich but his wife who benefits from his wealth has no income of her own and would therefore qualify for any income subsidies. Of course, it has been argued forcefully that these women are often trapped in their gilded cage, unable to escape an abusive marriage, for instance.
Finally, governments are reluctant to abandon conditionality of benefits, a paternalistic remnant of the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor. A liberal democracy’s commitment to providing everyone with a quality education, for example, is not paternalism but the recognition of a basic right. This right is expanding to include people in their late twenties and early thirties as jobs for this generation disappear and those that are left require more qualifications. All non-health-related government benefits today are based on the condition of job seeking. The benefits themselves must in no way compromise the incentive to work. Part of the justification for this is economic, the fear that wages will skyrocket, profits will plummet and the economy will collapse if no one is willing to work anymore. Another part is ideological; education and work are seen as developing and preserving “human capital.” Government wisdom rather than individual freedom decides how that is defined.
While I am optimistic that Basic Income will see the light of day in my lifetime, I am prepared to accept an imperfect version and leave to future generations the task of improving it.
Author biography: Pierre Madden is a zealous dilettante based in Montreal. He has been a linguist, a chemist, a purchasing coordinator, a production planner and a lawyer. His interest in Basic Income, he says, is personal. He sure could use it now!
by BIEN | Dec 3, 2016 | Bios & background Info
Karl Widerquist in 2014
Karl Widerquist was vice-chair of BIEN from May 2017 to August 2018, after serving as co-chair from October 2010 to May of 2017, and as a member of the executive committee from 2004 to 2010. He is a political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University-Qatar. He is the co-founder of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network, which he chaired from 1999 to 2008.
Widerquist is best known as an advocate of Basic Income. But he is also an interdisciplinary academic writer who has published in journals in fields as diverse as economics, politics, philosophy, and anthropology. He is a consistent critic of propertarianism (also known as right-libertarianism or libertarianism), Social Contract Theory, and the Lockean proviso. 8, and he cofounded in 2011. He has been a commentator on several television, radio, and print networks.
Contents
- Biography
- Advocacy of Basic Income
- Empirical and anthropological criticism of contemporary political theory
- Other political and economic theories
- Bibliography
- Media appearances
Biography
Karl Widerquist as a grad student-musician in 1993
Karl Widerquist was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1965. His family moved to Cassopolis, Michigan in 1969, and he grew up there. He completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics at the University of Michigan in 1987. For several years Widerquist pursued both music and economics. He was the original bass player for Michael McDermott, and play in several indie bands in New York in the 1990s.[i]
Widerquist completed a Ph.D. in economics at the City University of New York in 1996, later working at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and the Educational Priorities Panel. He was a Hoover Fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain where he worked with Philippe Van Parijs.[ii]
Widerquist received a second doctorate in Political Theory at the University of Oxford in 2006, and then worked as a Fellow at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Since 2009, he has been an Associate Professor at Georgetown University-Qatar.[iii]
Advocacy of Basic Income
Widerquist claims to have been a supporter of some form of Basic Income Guarantee since he heard the topic discussed on an episode of Milton Friedman’s television show, Free to Choose, in 1980, when he was only 15 years old.[iv] But he did not start writing, working, or publishing on the topic until the late 1990s.[v]
Michael A. Lewis, of Hunter College and USBIG
Widerquist has worked on Basic Income as an economist, a political theorist, a public policy analyst, and organizer. In 1999, Widerquist cofounded the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network along with Michael A. Lewis, Fred Block, Charles M. A. Clark, and Pamela Donovan. Widerquist chaired the organization until 2008 and edited its email NewsFlash until 2014.
Widerquist has been the co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) since 2008. In 2011, Widerquist and Yannick Vanderborght cofounded BIEN’s news website, Basic Income News, and severed as its principle writer and editor until 2014, and he still writes for it occasionally. He and BIEN’s other co-chair, Louise Haagh chartered BIEN as a non-profit organization in 2016 and oversaw the expansion of BIEN’s activities.[vi]
Widerquist’s writing on Basic Income includes several articles reexamined the results of the Negative Income Tax experiments conducted in the United States and Canada in the 1970s.[vii] He and Michael Howard co-edited two books on Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, addressing it as a small model of a Basic Income.[viii][ix]
Michael Howard holding umbrella and Karl Widerquist in the rain, New York in 2017
He has been critical of the “reciprocity” or “exploitation” objection to Basic Income. Under these objections people who receive Basic Income without work are said to fail in the duty of reciprocity by accepting social benefits without contributing to their production and thereby they are said to exploit workers who do produce those benefits. Widerquist’s responses hinge on the distribution of ownership of resources, which according to him, violates the principle of reciprocity because the law gives ownership of the Earth’s resources to a limited group of people without compensation for the loss of the commons for others. Therefore, Widerquist argues, to be consistent with reciprocity those who hold resources must make an unconditional payment to those who do not.[x]
If this argument works, instead of violating reciprocity, Basic Income is required by that principle. Widerquist further argues that Basic Income, so conceived, does not not exploit workers because it does not matter how one gets control of resources (through work, inheritance, or any other means). What matters is that anyone’s ownership of resources must not be part of a system that imposes propertyless on others.[xi] The absence of propertylessness is important not only to ensure that the privatization of resources is consistent with reciprocity but also to protect all workers from vulnerability to exploitation by their employers.[xii]
This view of property rights as something that both protects owners from interference and imposes interference on nonowners is a running theme throughout much of Widerquist’s writing and his arguments for Basic Income. This idea is closely related to left-libertarian or Georgist views of property, which are based on the principles of self-ownership and some principle of equal access to natural resources.[xiii] Left-libertarians argue that this view of resource rights is more consistent with negative freedom than any other view because the establishment and enforcement of property rights inherently interferes with non-owners in very substantive ways and in a very negative sense of the term.[xiv]
The first of two books laying out Widerquist’s theory, “Justice as the Pursuit of Accord.”
Widerquist does not endorse the whole of either of those theories of justice. Instead he presents his theory of justice as a separate ideology, which he calls “justice as the pursuit of accord” or “indepentarianism.” The central difference between this theory and more mainstream left-libertarianism is that it rejects the left-libertarian view that equal access to resources entitles people to an equal share of the market value of natural resources.[xv] Widerquist instead argues that disadvantage might be entitle to greater redistribution larger than what would be required to equalize the income generated by natural resources.[xvi]
He makes several arguments for this position, the most important of which is that respect for equal freedom requires that any legitimate authority protects individuals from the most substantively important interference. This principle, Widerquist argues, requires respect for individuals’ status free individuals, which in turn requires economic independence. They need access to enough resources to ensure that they are not forced by propertylessness to serve the interests of people empowered to give them access to resources. Widerquist calls this concept, “freedom as independence,” or “freedom as the power to say no.” He argues that respect for independence in the present socio-economic context requires redistribution to come at least in part in the form of an unconditional Basic Income and that it must be at least enough to meet an individuals’ basic needs. He also argues that Basic Income protecting vulnerable individuals from exploitation and other forms of economic distress better than traditional conditional welfare state policies.[xvii]
Philippe Van Parijs at TEDx Ghent
Widerquist is not the first to recognizing the poverty effectively forces individuals to work in service to more advantaged individuals, nor is he the first to argue that Basic Income can relieve that effective force. The unique feature of his theory is the central role that it gives to “the power to say no” in an individual’s status as a free person.[xviii] This line of argument seems to have recently become more important to the movement for Basic Income with even Philippe Van Parijs, one of the movement’s long-term leaders, arguing along these lines in his recent TEDx Talk, “The Instrument of Freedom.”
Empirical and anthropological criticism of contemporary political theory
Prehistoric Myths, this book mentions Basic Income only once–on the last page
Widerquist’s criticism of right-libertarianism began in 2009 when he published both an encyclopedia entry on libertarianism and an article criticizing libertarianism. The article argues that the central principles that are meant to determine the just distribution of property in a right-libertarian economy can justify government ownership of the powers to tax, regulate, and redistribute property just as well as they can justify private ownership of property. It argues that there are no historical or principled reasons to believe that private owners holdings of their powers are any any better justified than government holdings of their powers.[xix]
Karl Widerquist began collaborating with anthropologist Grant S. McCall with the publication of two articles in 2015 and a book entitled Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy released in January of 2017.[xx][xxi][xxii] The book uses anthropological evidence to debunk claims in contemporary political theory. It shows how, since the 1600s, most forms of social contract theory and natural property rights theory—especially those in the propertarian or right-libertarian tradition—have relied on the false empirical claim that Widerquist and McCall identify as “the Hobbesian hypothesis. That is, everyone is better off in a state society with a private property rights regime than everyone is, was, or would be in a society with neither of those institutions. The book shows how this claim became a central feature in the social contract justification of the state with Thomas Hobbes’s publication of Leviathan in 1651. Very much the same claim entered property rights theory a few decades later when John Locke made the fulfillment of his famous “proviso” central to his justification of the private property rights system. The book shows how the Hobbesian hypothesis has reappeared throughout the history of political thought since then and that it continues to be passed on in twenty-first century political theory.[xxiii]
Grant S. McCall of the Center for Human Environmental Research
The book argues, few of the philosophers who pass on the Hobbesian hypothesis offer any evidence to support it. Early philosophers relied on the colonial-era prejudice that any civilized man must be far better off than any savage natives. Later philosophers have simply relied on how commonly this claim is repeated to give it the air of obviousness. Yet, it is not the type of claim that can be obvious. It involves a comparison between the least advantaged people in modern, capitalist states with people who live in small-scale, stateless societies very remote to most modern writes in time and/or in place.[xxiv]
Widerquist and McCall present several chapters of evidence making that comparison and showing that the Hobbesian hypothesis is false: contemporary society has failed to fulfill the Lockean proviso. The least advantaged people in contemporary state society are actually worse off than the remaining native peoples who live outside the reach of the authority of the state or the property rights system. Therefore, if either of the two theories is to successfully justify the state and/or the property rights system, societies have to treat their disadvantaged individuals much better than they do now—whether that be by providing a Basic Income or by some other means.[xxv]
Other political and economic theories
Widerquist coauthored a textbook entitle, Economics for Social Workers.[xxvi] He has argued that Piketty’s observation that the rate of return on capital tends to exceed the growth rate in the economy should be seen as an outcome of the institutional setting rather than as a natural law of capitalism.[xxvii] Widerquist has also examined the effect that relaxing public choice theory’s assumption of self-interested behavior. He shows that many public choice problems exist as long as political actors are rational and disagree about what government should do, even if their disagreement stems from adherence to competing ethical theories rather than from competing self-interested wants.[xxviii]
Although Widerquist’s work uses some sufficientarian assumption, he criticized other aspects of sufficientarianism.[xxix] He has done historical work examining the many different (and often contradictory) ways that Lockean appropriation theory has been interpreted and revised.[xxx] He has written critically about wage subsidies as a redistributive strategy.[xxxi]
Media appearances
Karl Widerquist has frequently appeared in print, radio, and television news networks, including:
Click here for an updated (hopefully updated) list of Widerquist’s media appearances.
Publications
Books
Michael Anthony Lewis and Karl Widerquist, 2002. Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services, New York: Columbia University Press
Karl Widerquist, Michael Anthony Lewis, and Steven Pressman (eds.), 2005. The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate
Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Karl Widerquist, Jose Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, and Jurgen De Wispelaere (eds.), July 2013. Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell
Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
Journal Articles
Karl Widerquist, 1999. “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income” Politics and Society, 33 (3): 386–401
Karl Widerquist, 2001. “Perspectives on the Guaranteed Income, Part I” the Journal of Economic Issues 35 (3): 749–757
Karl Widerquist, 2001. “Perspectives on the Guaranteed Income, Part II” the Journal of Economic Issues 35 (4): 1019-1030
Karl Widerquist, 2003. “Public Choice and Altruism,” the Eastern Economic Journal 29 (3): 277-278
Karl Widerquist, 2005. “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” the Journal of Socio-Economics 34 (1): 49–81
Michael Lewis, Steven Pressman & Karl Widerquist, 2005. “The basic income guarantee and social economics,” The Review of Social Economy 63 (4): 587-593.
Karl Widerquist and Jurgen De Wispelaere, 2006. “Launching a Basic Income Journal” Basic Income Studies 1 (1): 1-6
Karl Widerquist and Michael A. Lewis, 2006. “The Basic Income Guarantee and the goals of equality, efficiency, and environmentalism,” International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2 (1): 21-43.
Karl Widerquist, 2006. “Who Exploits Who?” Political Studies 54 (3): 444-464
Karl Widerquist, 2006. “The Bottom Line in a Basic Income Experiment” Basic Income Studies 1 (2): 1-5
Karl Widerquist, 2008. “Problems with Wage Subsidies: Phelps’s economic discipline and undisciplined economics” International Journal of Green Economics 2 (3): 329-339
Karl Widerquist, 2009. “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (1): 43-72
Karl Widerquist, 2010. “The Physical Basis of Voluntary Trade,” Human Rights Review 11 (1): 83-103
Karl Widerquist, 2010. “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation,” Public Reason 2 (3): 3-26
Karl Widerquist, 2010. “How the Sufficiency Minimum Becomes a Social Maximum,” Utilitas 22 (4): 474-480
Grant S. McCall and Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Evolution of Equality: Rethinking Variability and Egalitarianism Among Modern Forager Societies.” Ethnoarchaeology 7 (1) March: 21 – 44
Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Piketty Observation Against the Institutional Background: How natural is this natural tendency and what can we do about it?” Basic Income Studies 10 (1), June, 83-90
Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, 2015. “Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies.
[i] “Personal Web Page of Karl Widerquist”, at widerquist.com/karl/personal.html
[ii] “Karl Widerquist”, at explore.georgetown.edu
[iii] “Karl Widerquist”, at explore.georgetown.edu
[iv] “Personal Web Page of Karl Widerquist”, at widerquist.com/karl/personal.html
[v] “Selected Works of Karl Widerquist”, at works.bepress.com/widerquist/
[vi] “About BIEN”, at basicincome.org.
[vii] Karl Widerquist, 2005. “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn from the Negative Income Tax Experiments?” the Journal of Socio-Economics 34 (1): 49–81
[viii] Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Examining its Suitability as a Model, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[ix] Karl Widerquist and Michael W. Howard (eds.) 2012. Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[x] Karl Widerquist, 1999. “Reciprocity and the Guaranteed Income” Politics and Society, 33 (3): 386–401
[xi] Karl Widerquist, 2006. “Who Exploits Who?” Political Studies 54 (3): 444-464
[xii] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “The Physical Basis of Voluntary Trade,” Human Rights Review 11 (1): 83-103
[xiii] Vallentyne, P. and H. Steiner (2000), The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An anthology of historical writings. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
[xiv] Vallentyne, P. and H. Steiner (2000b), Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Palgrave
[xv] Vallentyne, P. (2000). “Left-Libertarianism – A Primer,” in P. Vallentyne and H. Steiner, Eds.). Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Palgrave, 1-22
[xvi] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[xvii] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[xviii] Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
[xix] Karl Widerquist, 2009. “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8 (1): 43-72
[xx] Grant S. McCall and Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Evolution of Equality: Rethinking Variability and Egalitarianism Among Modern Forager Societies.” Ethnoarchaeology 7 (1) March: 21 – 44
[xxi] Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, 2015. “Myths about the State of Nature and the Reality of Stateless Societies.” Analyse & Kritik 37 (2), August
[xxii] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxiii] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxiv] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxv] Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall. Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, January 2017
[xxvi] Michael Anthony Lewis and Karl Widerquist, 2002. Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services, New York: Columbia University Press
[xxvii] Karl Widerquist, 2015. “The Piketty Observation Against the Institutional Background: How natural is this natural tendency and what can we do about it?” Basic Income Studies 10 (1), June, 83-90
[xxviii] Karl Widerquist, 2003. “Public Choice and Altruism,” the Eastern Economic Journal 29 (3): 277-278
[xxix] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “How the Sufficiency Minimum Becomes a Social Maximum,” Utilitas 22 (4): 474-480
[xxx] Karl Widerquist, 2010. “Lockean Theories of Property: Justifications for Unilateral Appropriation,” Public Reason 2 (3): 3-26
[xxxi] Karl Widerquist, 2008. “Problems with Wage Subsidies: Phelps’s economic discipline and undisciplined economics” International Journal of Green Economics 2 (3): 329-339
Karl Widerquist in speaking in front of (a painting of) the Danish Parliament
by Guest Contributor | Dec 1, 2016 | Opinion
By Alexander de Roo
The discussion about basic income has changed completely.
Thirty years ago, it was a very principled debate. High unemployment. No future. Thus, give us a basic income, because the system cannot give us paid work. The counter argument was you must do paid work to receive an income. A basic income is morally unacceptable.
How different is the discussion now: when we go out and hand leaflets in the streets, 50 to 90 percent of the population takes our leaflets (50 percent in rich area’s and 90 percent in poor neighborhoods). The most common reaction is: basic income is a good idea, but how do you finance it? Who pays for it?
A very pragmatic discussion no longer principles banging against each another.
The confidence in the present social system in The Netherlands is shaken compared to 30 years ago. Previously you got five years’ unemployment money and one could easily look for another job. Now even middle class people lose their well-paid job and after two years of unemployment money must ‘eat up’ (meaning sell) their own house to get social assistant money…. five million people have a steady, normal contract. That is ten percent less than ten years ago. Two million people have flexible contracts for bull-shit jobs, two million people live from social benefits (in different forms), one million people are independent professionals without access to unemployment money (ZZP or freelancers), the pension age keeps going up (now 67 years), while people above 50 years have zero (or realistically around 1 percent) changes on the labor market.
But the Netherlands is still one the five or ten richest countries in the world!
The two biggest newspapers held polls about basic income! About 40 – 44 percent comes out in favor. A reliable national poll measured 40 percent in favor, 45 percent against and 15 percent do not know. The majority of the electorate of the green and left parties are in favor. With the two right wing parties it is the opposite: their electorate is against: “we are working hard and do not want to pay a basic income for these (lazy) people that just want to have a basic income”.
Most interesting is that the voters for the Freedom party of Mister Wilders (our local Trump) are divided: 37 percent in favor and 46 percent against, 17 percent don’t know. Almost the same as the national average! Politically we must use this.
But the leaders of the green and left wing parties do not take up the issue of a basic income. They stick to repairing /amending the old social system. They think (and hope) the economy is recovering, unemployment will fall and then this basic income discussion will go away like it did around the year 2000.
But they are wrong we have now one year economic recovery: the result 12,000 new steady jobs and 78,000 flexible low-value jobs. The flexibility of the labor market keeps growing. We will turn back the clock on these flex jobs; providing more jobs is the answer of the green and left wing leaders.
Our answer is to increase our support for the basic income alternative in the upcoming national elections March 15, 2017. Around 60,000 people signed a petition for a basic income in 2018. Demonstrating that 800 € for every citizen in the Netherlands is easily affordable and that even 1,100 € is easily financed.
After the elections, we will work with respectable institutions to come up with a transition route from the present situation to a full basic income.
Annotation: A basic income of 800 € requires 10 billion € more per year then the present situation, 1,100 € will cost around 30 billion euro more. The present government (Conservatives + Social democrats) have cut the state expenditure with 30 billion € and raised indirect taxes with 16 billion euro’s: in total 56 billion in the last 4 years.
Alexander de Roo is a founder of BIEN in 1986, former BIEN treasurer (1986-2004), and now Chairman of the Dutch branch of BIEN.
