by Tyler Prochazka | Aug 24, 2016 | Opinion
One of the most visible libertarian advocates of the basic income is Dr. Matt Zwolinski. Zwolinski is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego and has written extensively on the libertarian case for the basic income.
In my interview with Zwolinski, he said a basic income “can help protect the freedom of certain vulnerable people,” although he recognizes there is a trade-off due to the coercive nature of taxes.
Zwolinski also dismissed some of the common libertarian objections to the basic income, saying it is a hard moral sell to claim taxation to help the poor is indistinguishable from a mugger stealing for himself.
“I think there’s a moral case, based on freedom and a correct theory of property rights, that justifies some form of economic redistribution,” he said.
For those libertarians that think basic income disqualifies them from the libertarian label, Zwolisnki said this does not make much sense since many libertarian thinkers throughout history have advocated for the basic income approach.
“Libertarianism is and should remain a pretty big tent,” Zwolinski said.
As a libertarian, what is the best reason to support UBI?
I don’t think that there’s a single best reason. I’m a pluralist in my moral philosophy, and so I think that a lot of different kinds of reasons are usually appropriate in assessing the case for or against a particular piece of public policy.
But, basically, I think there are two strong libertarian arguments in support of a basic income, one broadly deontological in nature and the other broadly consequentialist. The deontological argument has to do with the limits to the libertarian case for private property. For reasons that I think were very well laid out by Herbert Spencer in 1851, I don’t think the standard Lockean story about self-ownership and labor mixing gets us very far in justifying private property in land and other natural resources. For starters, that account simply doesn’t match the historical reality in which most private property originated in force and theft rather than peaceful homesteading. But, more fundamentally, I just don’t see how mixing your labor in a natural object gets you a property right in the whole economic value of that object, as opposed to a right to that portion of the value created by your labor. Basically, I think Henry George was right. And so I think that there’s a strong case to be made for a basic income funded by a “Single Tax” on “land rent” – the economic value of unimproved natural resources such as land.
The more consequentialist case has to do with protecting individual freedom. I call it a consequentialist case rather than a utilitarian one deliberately. The idea is that a basic income can help protect the freedom of certain vulnerable people. But I recognize that a basic income that’s large and broad enough to do that might have to be funded by taxes that violate the freedom of others. So we’re trading off freedom for freedom. That might sound scary to some libertarians, but I think that unless you’re an anarchist you’re already willing to accept something like this. Tax-funded police services, after all, protect individual freedom but are funded by coercive taxation.
I think the seeds for a freedom-based defense of a basic income are present in the writings of Friedrich Hayek, especially in his Constitution of Liberty. Hayek himself defended a kind of basic income, but was never entirely clear about what he saw the justification for it to be. I’ve tried to work out what a plausible Hayekian justification might be, at least in terms of broad outlines. Basically, I see Hayek as embracing a kind of republican account of liberty, where freedom means not just not being subject to the initiation of force but, more generally, not being subject to the arbitrary will of any other person. Once you take that account of freedom on board, I think you can justify a basic income as a way of protecting the economically vulnerable. The idea is that people who might otherwise have to accept any offer an employer makes or else starve aren’t really free. A basic income gives them the ability to say “no,” and thus protects them from being bossed around by the economically powerful.
One interesting thing to note about these two arguments is that they’re not just different in terms of where they start – the moral premises on which they’re based. I think they’re also different in terms of where they end up – in the kind of basic income they justify. If the Georgist argument works, I think that justifies a truly universal basic income. The earth belongs to all of us, and so all of us have an equal claim to the economic value of unimproved natural resources. Now, depending on how much of present wealth you think is due to labor, rather than raw natural resources, the value of this kind of basic income might not be very large. So, on this argument, what you might end up with is a very broad but relatively small basic income. Everybody gets something, but nobody gets much.
The freedom-based argument, on the other hand, doesn’t give us any reason to write a check to Bill Gates. His freedom is already protected by his economic power, so there’s no real point in giving him any more money. And the same will be true of a lot of other people, not just the rich but probably most of the middle class as well. So if the case for a basic income is based on the protection of individual freedom, I think what that gets you is something less than a universal basic income. Not everybody gets something, but what those who need it get will be large enough to effectively protect them against economic domination by others.
What would your ideal UBI look like?
Designing a policy like a universal basic income is obviously a complicated task. And I think it’s a task that should be highly sensitive not only to the kinds of moral considerations with which I spend most of my time as a philosopher, but to empirical considerations of the kinds studied by economists, sociologists, and the like. So I don’t want to claim that I’ve got anything close to the final word on this. I have some ideas, but this is definitely not a one-person project.
That said, I think that given the two distinct moral considerations that justify a basic income, there’s a case to be made for having two distinct basic income type policies that respond to those considerations. One would be a small, truly universal cash grant based on the economic value of unimproved natural resources. Think of this as something like the Alaskan Permanent Fund writ large. The other would be a less universal but more generous grant directed toward those individuals who fall below a certain specified threshold of economic sufficiency. I think the best way of implementing this second program is probably something like Milton Friedman’s Negative Income Tax, though I also like the proposal set forth by Charles Murray in his book, In Our Hands. In both cases, people earning less than a certain amount of money get a cash grant from the government, with which they can do whatever they wish; while people earning more than that amount get nothing. That conditionality makes the program less than truly universal. But I think you’ve got to do something like that in order to make a basic income economically feasible. Many basic income enthusiasts want a grant that is (1) universal, (2) large enough to provide people with an adequate level of income, and (3) economically affordable. But you can’t satisfy all three of those conditions at once. A Negative Income Tax satisfies conditions (2) and (3), which to my mind are the most important conditions, morally speaking. Condition (1) might be politically important in terms of generating and sustaining support for the program. I’m not sure. But it seems to me that something has to give, and I think there’s a strong case to be made for keeping (2) and (3) and relegating (1) to the land-tax component of the joint program.
Many libertarians say removing all welfare would be superior to replacing welfare with the UBI. Do you agree with this sentiment?
No, I don’t think so. But before I explain why, let’s be clear about two different conversations we could have about this question. One is a conversation about ideals – what is the best kind of society we could imagine as libertarians, regardless of how different that society might look from our own? The other conversation is about pragmatics – what should libertarians advocate here and now, given all the injustices, imperfections and disagreements with which any practical political proposal has to deal?
Now, as it happens, I don’t think either of those conversations gets you to the conclusion that all state-based welfare ought to be eliminated. That’s certainly not something that has any practical chance of being implemented in a world where, after all, most people aren’t libertarians. But I don’t think it’s very attractive as an ideal, either. I think there’s a moral case, based on freedom and a correct theory of property rights, that justifies some form of economic redistribution. Obviously, we’ve had a lot of bad redistribution in our society. We’ve have redistribution to the poor that’s made their lives worse, rather than better. And we’ve had a lot of straightforwardly regressive redistribution that actually takes money and opportunities away from the poor and channels it toward the better off. And libertarians have rightly criticized those programs. But the idea that anytime the state takes money from the well-off and gives it to the poor, that’s morally indistinguishable from a mugger on the street taking your wallet at gunpoint, well, that’s a hard sell. And not, I think, simply because non-libertarians are being thick-headed.
In my experience, many libertarians have called me a statist and denied me the label of libertarian for supporting the UBI. Have you had similar experiences and what is your reaction?
Sure, I get that all the time. Some people seem to think a desire to eliminate the welfare state is just part of what it means to be a libertarian. But what’s their basis for that? That Murray Rothbard thought so? Or Ayn Rand? But why should we take them as the final say on what libertarianism is or isn’t?
As I’ve written about before, there are a number of people who fall pretty squarely in the libertarian intellectual tradition – Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Friedrich Hayek, and Herbert Spencer, to name a few – who don’t hold that view. Why should their views count any less toward defining what libertarianism is than Murray Rothbard’s?
I’m finishing up a book on the history of libertarian thought with John Tomasi. And one of the themes of that book is that the libertarian intellectual tradition is incredibly pluralistic. Some libertarians are consequentialists, some are deontologists, and some are ethical egoists. Some are anarchists, some are minimal-statists, and some are classical liberals. Of course, not all of those views can be right, and libertarians should (and do!) argue amongst themselves about which view is the best libertarian view. But I think it’s silly – and more than a little ironic! – for libertarians to try to write people with whom they disagree out of libertarianism altogether on the basis of some putative ideological authority. Libertarianism is and should remain a pretty big tent.
by Guest Contributor | Aug 8, 2016 | News
Article originally appeared on the Libertarian Republic by Brett Linley
At the FreedomFest convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, Gary Johnson took a stance puzzling to many libertarians. Per the Basic Income Earth Network, Johnson conveyed that he would be “open” to the idea of Universal Basic Income.
To many fiscal conservatives, UBI seems like a blanket handout to engorge the welfare state. However, Governor Johnson claims a libertarian justification for the system. “Like many libertarians, Johnson said he liked the idea of the UBI because of its potential to save money in bureaucratic costs, freeing up more money to give people directly.”
In fact, Johnson is not the lone free market defender of UBI. Other prominent libertarian voices have spoken up to defend the idea in the past.
Milton Friedman advocated for the Negative Income Tax, acknowledged as a close cousin to UBI. Libertarianism.org published a piece by Matt Zwolinski in 2013 about the concept’s libertarian merits.
Some will automatically deride Universal Basic Income as socialism, and dismiss it immediately. However, when structured correctly, UBI could actually become a positive force for liberty. All libertarians should give an honest look at the policy before passing judgment.
How Universal Basic Income Promotes Liberty
Most libertarians can agree that the welfare state, as it stands, is a mess. With that in mind, the issue becomes what we can do to make it less convoluted. UBI provides a unique opportunity to tackle this issue.
The only way that such a system would be workable, or even desirable, is if we scrap all existing welfare programs. The government would have to phase out programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps with everything else. In their place, we’d receive a streamlined process that would provide new, efficient economic incentives.
It is also no small consideration that the federal bureaucracy would substantially recede. All of the complex agencies tasked with administering various programs would become one. It is certainly easier to imagine monitoring potential waste and abuse in one program than a dozen.
At first glance, it may be hard to believe that handing out checks provides efficient incentives. The important economic question to keep in mind, however, is “compared to what?”
As much as libertarians would like to see all welfare programs abolished and replaced with nothing, politicians and voters will never support leaving so many objectively worse off. While current welfare programs actively encourage people not to work, UBI would remove these disincentives.
How Universal Basic Income Gets People to Work
Under our current welfare system, people can be booted off welfare once they reach a certain income level. Upon losing their welfare checks, people can actually end up as net losers. The system in place incentivizes people to stay unemployed so they can maintain their current standard of living.
Under UBI, people would be able to pursue employment without fear of becoming worse off. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray advocated in the Wall Street Journal, the benefits would decrease slowly as income rises in an ideal system. However, a certain immovable standard would be necessary in face of Social Security’s abolition. People still will need that source of retirement income.
Certainly, some people will abuse UBI and use it to live off the fat of the government. What’s important to recognize is that people already do this under the current system. Many people value their welfare wages plus their free time over the wages made from working. In the latter case, as aforementioned, working can make them net losers who no longer have any free time.
When it comes to considering whether UBI will make this problem worse, it appears unlikely. While some may dropout of the workforce, others may join. This can be an opportunity to help the most economically disadvantaged and bring about a respectable society.
Johnson’s Advocacy of Universal Basic Income is Good for America
People often deride libertarians for failing to take interest in the less fortunate. While the market truly is the tide that lifts all ships, some boats have holes through no fault of their own. Given the governmental structure we find ourselves in, instead of the one we wish we had, few options are available.
No monarchs exist to lay down libertarian law, and certain political realities must be accepted to fix the broken welfare state. Johnson realizes that even if he becomes president, he will not be able to throw millions of welfare recipients into the economy Obama has created without a life raft.
What Johnson can do is propose a system that can attract bipartisan support while making America more free. Not many such proposals exist, but UBI is one of them.
Maintaining and strengthening the protections for America’s most vulnerable satisfies Democrats. Cutting down bureaucracy and getting people to work can draw Republicans. Johnson understands that when applied correctly, UBI can improve lives. With the proper consideration, that’s something libertarians should support.
Image Source:
By Wikideas1 (talk) (Uploads) – , CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49782720
by Guest Contributor | Jul 22, 2016 | Opinion
Donald Trump and the Prospects for a Basic Income
By Steven Shafarman
The Republican Party convention is over, and I’m feeling hopeful. Trump’s triumph may be a big step forward in our campaign to enact a basic income in the United States.
With Trump’s speech, and the convention’s overall tone, the party has completed its transition and come out of the closet. It’s now the Repugnant Party.
Our best hope is a landslide defeat, leaving Trump and the Repugnant Party in the dust. That will also leave Republicans with the task of rebuilding, seeking to reunite their Pro-Trump, Never-Trump, and Stuck-with-Trump factions. They’ll need a platform that’s positive, uplifting, and optimistic, something like a new version of Reagan’s “morning in America” — and they’ll have that, if the reborn Republican Party endorses a version of basic income.
Republicans might call it a “negative income tax,” quoting Milton Friedman, who strongly endorsed it in several books and many articles. Perhaps they’ll favor “Citizen Dividends,” to underscore the fact that the basic income is for citizens only, not immigrants. During their convention, they loudly denounced Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party as the establishment status quo, and the cause of everything that’s wrong in America today. Republicans can reinforce those arguments by touting basic income as a way to cut taxes, end corporate welfare, and achieve many of their other goals and values.
Democrats will be pressing hard to bring rapid progress, and President Hillary Clinton will be eager to prove that she is much more than a third term for Barack Obama. She can do that by talking about basic income, even if she only floats it as an idea, stopping short of full-on support. They might like UBI, universal or unconditional basic income, using the “U” to emphasize liberal values. If Clinton doesn’t act, Bernie Sanders and his supporters may became our champions, running with this issue and taking over the Democratic Party.
We Americans will have a basic income within the next ten years, I predict, possibly within two to three years.
Steven Shafarman is a co-founder of Basic Income Action, a life member of BIEN, and on the coordinating committee of USBIG. His forthcoming book is The Basic Income Imperative: for peace, justice, liberty, and personal dignity. (If you are or know a literary agent or publisher, please contact him through www.basicincomeaction.org.)
Donald Trump photo credit: Gage Skidmore (2013)
by Kate McFarland | May 20, 2016 | News
Although a universal basic income is likely to be conceived in the public eye as a utopian dream of the left, its proponents are often keen to note the idea’s historical appeal across the political spectrum, citing its support from the likes of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
Nor is basic income off the radar of the contemporary right. Indeed, the idea recently received some discussion on the blog of the noted conservative publication National Review — with Iain Murray, Vice President of Strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tentatively endorsing the idea. (The CEI is a think tank that describes itself as “dedicated to free enterprise and limited government.”)
In a short post, Murray responds to Michael Strain of the conservative American Heritage Foundation, who published a critique of basic income in the same blog as well as the Washington Post — ultimately coming down against the idea despite admitting several of its appealing features, such as reducing bureaucracy and removing the stigma associated with receipt of government aid.
Murray claims, contra Strain, that a basic income would not problematically dis-incentivize work — unlike the current system of welfare in the United States — and that, on the contrary, it would empower many people to contribute more productively to the economy. He also contends that a UBI would encourage charitable giving.
Granted, Murray does emphasize two caveats: a UBI might just become an add-on to an overblown welfare state, and “it still relies on robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Despite Murray’s reservations, his tentative endorsement merits attention by other proponents of a free market and limited government, those who might otherwise scoff at a policy sometimes flippantly caricatured as “the government giving away money for free.”
Iain Murray, 4 April 2016, “Tentatively for Universal Basic Income,” National Review: The Corner.
Image Source: Annwong1026 (via Wikimedia Commons)
by Guest Contributor | Dec 17, 2015 | Opinion
By Jim Pugh
“I like the idea, but it’ll never happen.”
I hear this response a lot when talking to people about establishing a universal basic income in the United States. Once you get past the explanation of what a basic income is and how offering it could eliminate poverty, support entrepreneurship, and prepare us for a future where most jobs have been displaced by automation, people are generally quite supportive”Š-“Šbut they don’t believe that it could ever be implemented here.
And their skepticism is entirely reasonable. In today’s political climate, it’s hard to imagine how a program as radical as basic income could be enacted. When simply passing a budget to keep the federal government operational starts to seem like a big accomplishment, what chance do we have for major reform?
But in spite of the perceived impasse, there is a viable path to implementing universal basic income in the United States. Here’s how it can work.
Step 1: Spread Awareness
If you were to stop a random person on the street and ask them what they think about basic income, you’d most likely get a confused stare. While more people have become interested in the idea in recent years, basic income is still unknown to the population at large. What’s more, when you first tell people that the solution to some of our biggest economic challenges is just giving everyone money, a lot think the idea sounds crazy.
For that reason, the first step on the path to an American basic income is raising awareness and support across the country. For radical reform to become possible, there needs to be a solid majority of Americans behind the idea.
There isn’t any secret formula for accomplishing this”Š-“Šit’s up to those of us who support the idea to make it happen. We can talk to our friends and family and convince them of the importance of basic income. We can produce compelling media that explains the idea and why it will work. We can organize events to capture the attention of the press and general public.
In 1933, a man name Francis Townsend wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper, proposing a plan to provide money every month to the elderly across the United States. Within a year, millions of people had organized into grassroots groups around the country, distributing pamphlets to their community and advocating for passage of the Townsend Plan. And just one year after that, Franklin Roosevelt proposed and passed the Social Security Act, providing the first-ever federal assistance to American retirees.
More and more, people are starting to realize the system we have right now is no longer working. If we let them know there’s a better alternative out there, we can build a movement in support of universal basic income in the United States.
Step 2: Test It Out
Providing a full basic income to all Americans would be a huge leap forward. Before we can make that leap, we need to try it out in a more limited capacity.
The second step on the path to an American basic income is to enact smaller-scale prototypes of the program and see how they go. By observing actual implementations of basic income-like programs in the United States, we can gain insight into how a full program would work and allay the concerns of skeptics. And the cost could be considerably lower, making prototypes much more achievable in the short term.
There are a couple of different models for how basic income prototype programs could work:
Dividends from Shared Resources
One type of basic income prototype actually exists in the US already: the Alaska Permanent Fund. Since 1976, the state of Alaska has managed a fund which is financed by oil revenue in the state. The fund pays out dividends each year, split equally amongst all Alaska residents. Over the last 25 years, the dividend payment has varied between $800 and $3,200 per person.
While the amount awarded isn’t sufficient to be considered a true basic income, the Alaska Permanent Fund is an example of an unconditional, universal income. In his book With Liberty and Dividends for All, Peter Barnes argues that this program could pave the way for adoption of similar plans by other states and could be expanded to provide increased universal income down the road.
Credit: 3D Printing Industry.
In fact, an analogous program is currently being considered in Oregon. Under the Carbon Fee and Dividend plan, polluters in the state would need to pay for the carbon they emitted, and this money would then be distributed equally to all Oregon residents. While the Alaska Permanent Fund model only makes sense for states with large oil industries, Carbon Fee and Dividend could be expanded to every state in the country.
Randomized Trials
Another potential prototype model is to provide a full basic income, but only to a small number of people. Randomized trials could be set up and run, where certain families in a given region would receive a basic income, and the program impact could be assessed by comparing to non-participating families.
In fact, an experiment similar to this was previously run in the US in the 60s and 70s”Š-“Šin various locations across the country (New Jersey cities; rural Iowa and North Carolina; Gary, Indiana; and Seattle and Denver), randomly-selected families were provided with a “negative income tax,” which gave substantial direct monetary support to those with low incomes.
The study showed some initial promising results, with increased school attendance rates and only a modest reduction in labor rates. Randomized trials are now being set up abroad in Finland to evaluate the effect of a universal basic income there. If more experiments were conducted in the United States, it could provide a much clearer picture of the full impact of enacting basic income here.
Although labeled as the second step on the path, implementing prototypes could actually happen in parallel to raising awareness amongst the public. These efforts could even be complementary”Š-“Šthe success of prototype programs would increase visibility and support for basic income. And in turn, greater support would make additional prototypes easier to enact. We need some very concrete examples of how basic income can work, though, before we’ll be ready for final step.
Step 3: Wait for Lightning to Strike
Let’s say we’ve reached a point where most people know about and support basic income, and there are prototype programs showing it working. Even then, given the current level of dysfunction in Washington, DC, it would still be extremely difficult to enact a federal version. That’s why the third step to implement an American basic income is to wait for the right moment.
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes how in times of crisis, people may be willing to accept big changes that normally would seem far too radical. While Klein’s focus is on the enactment of exploitative corporate policies, the same principle can apply to positive changes.
If automation continues to displace jobs as predicted in the coming years, there will be moments of extreme disruption to our economy. Grocery stores will lay off big parts of their workforce as cheap, automated stocking and checkout services become available. More automated restaurants like Eatsa will appear, which employ fewer service staff. Millions of jobs will be lost in the transportation industry to self-driving vehicles.
There are no doubts about it, the transportation industry, in particular, has already undergone some significant changes over the past few years. For example, thanks to developments in technology such as Titanwinds trucking dispatch software, it is now possible for fleet managers to plan routes in real-time to ship goods and control their fleets in the most efficient way. With this in mind, it is certainly intriguing to consider what else might be in store for the future of the trucking sector for instance.
As the magnitude of these disruptions becomes apparent, people will be knocked out of their normal routine and be willing to embrace a big change. At that moment, if we have public awareness and support, and if we’ve demonstrated the program’s effectiveness, people across the country can rally behind a clarion call to push past the gridlock in Washington”Š-“Šand we will have a real chance to enact an American basic income.
What’s Next?
The steps laid out above are not theoretical”Š-“Šmany of us are already working to achieve them.
Discussion groups and panels are being convened around the country in places like New York, Palo Alto, Washington, DC, and San Francisco. A new nonprofit organization, Basic Income Action, is pushing presidential candidates to engage on the issue.
People are crowdfunding their own basic income and using the money to support themselves as they write about the idea. An Oregon nonprofit is working to push for the enactment of Carbon Fee and Dividend there.
And on the weekend of November 13, the first-ever Basic Income Create-A-Thon was held in San 
Francisco, where writers, artists, videographers, developers, musicians, and others came together to create content and media around the theme of basic income. More Create-A-Thons are now being planned across the country.
An American basic income is possible”Š-“Šand it’s up to us to make it happen.
Jim Pugh is the CEO of ShareProgress, a politically-progressive tech company offering tools for social sharing. He is the former CTO for Rebuild the Dream, and Director of Analytics for @BarackObama. He holds a PhD in Robotics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
