All ten candidates at the Democratic Deabte for the United States Presidential elections.
“It is not left, it is not right, it is forward”. Andrew Yang drank from Scott Santens famous words, to finish off his contribution to the Democratic Debate to the United States Presidential elections in 2020. The political debate, held on June 27th 2019, featured all 10 Democratic Party candidates who qualified to be in the televised debate (more than 65000 donors). Yang’s Freedom Dividend was voiced, for the first time ever, on a US national debate stage, shortly described as a 1000 $/month for every adult citizen, unconditionally.
Although severely time restrained to hush in his ideas – he was only allowed 2 minutes and 50 seconds of speaking time, the lowest of all candidates present in the debate – Yang succeeded in the attempt to plant the seed of basic income among the American People. People are definitely interested in basic income, or at least the basic income as Andrew Yang conceives it, considering the spikes in views of his intervention clips, posted by NBC, which surpassed those of any other candidate. Soon after the debate, Google searches for “basic income” spiked to about 300% of the average search results for those terms.
In March, Yang’s candidacy had just surpassed the 65000-donor mark; now it has gone over 130000 donors, qualifying him to further debates, to be held in September and October this year. Also, his platform’s list of followers shows no signs of slowing down, having gained more than 100000 new followers, just for having participated in this debate. Whether or not Andrew Yang will become the next President of the United States, his candidacy has already been historical, by definitely sketching basic income on the public and political arena.
Yang’s contributions to the debate can be seen on this short video:
In this article, Daniel Mermelstein delves into the relationship between basic income and cryptocurrencies. The combination of these two innovative, by some considered radical approaches to social security and money, can rock the foundations of most people’s beliefs.
Starting with cryptocurrency, Mermelstein opens with a brief history of Bitcoin, addressed how to has become more mainstream thanks to the bitcoin gordon ramsay and other celebrities have advertised or talked about, the first computer-based coin to overcome the problem of “double-spend”. This was a major step, since in the digital world it is very easy to just make copies of, say, 5€ bills. The process of making transactions with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin is very complex, involving “difficult cryptographic mathematics”, but in the end it boils down to a few crucial characteristics: anyone can access to bitcoins (by opening an account named “wallet” or through cryptocurrency trading portals like kryptoportal.pl), all transactions are public and verifiable (on the blockchain), it is corruption-proof (internal cryptographically linked kind of structure) and the supply of money is known and controlled. It is also independent of governments, banks, rating agencies and other institutional edifices which are often prone to corruption and secrecy.
Although Mermelstein acknowledges basic income and cryptocurrencies as foreign concepts for many people, he assures that as time goes on more people will learn about crypto, find the best crypto alerts apps, invest, and buy/sell things using it. Let us refresh our memory with the fact that the idea of basic income is already imbued in social policy programs such as Child Benefits, and that other, non-state tokens (forms of money) have already been in circulation for quite some time, without many surprises (e.g.: private “loyalty card points”, “air miles”). So, he points out that cryptocurrencies can actually help implementing basic income, since the former can be designed in such a way to deliver basic income main attributes: universality, unconditionality, individuality, money-based and periodic. As the only operational example, he cites Manna, which can be traded by other currencies (such as the US dollar) and claims a 100 000 users base at the moment. Manna features Eric Stetson as CEO, and Andrew Yang as one of the consultants.
As for challenges and the path going forward, Mermelstein lists a few hurdles still to overcome by cryptocurrencies, especially in the attempt of dispensing a basic income. One such difficulty is guaranteeing individuality, since at the moment it is very difficult to connect a ‘wallet’ (as in the Bitcoin system) to a single person. This is handy for those buying cryptocurrency australia has to offer, but not so much for basic income purposes. Another problem has to do with universal adoption, since these systems require, at least, an electricity power supply, a computer and/or a smartphone and an internet connection. This leaves out, at the moment, a large proportion of the world’s population. Also, scale can be a problem in operating cryptocurrencies, given the amount of data necessary to guarantee accuracy and tamper-free operation. If a large segment of the population uses such a system as Bitcoin to its daily expenses, there isn’t, at present, enough available computing power to guarantee a smooth operation. That only becomes a problem, though, if in fact enough people adopt a cryptocurrency as their preferred medium of exchange. Adoption, on the other hand, is always critical, since, at core, it is a trust issue. Finally, and apart from the corruption-free design of these new currency systems, there is always some core group of developers, who, especially in the case of large-scale adoption, will be targeted for scrutiny and fairness.
The National Academy of Social Insurance recently (April 2019) published a paper where the idea of implementing a relatively small basic income ($200-$400 per month, at least initially) has been explored by authors William Arnone, Peter Barnes, Renée Landers and Griffin Murphy, supported by the Economic Security Project. The paper goes into detail on potential mechanisms by which this basic income might be implemented in the USA.
This study intents to deliver information on how to fulfil the vision outlined in the historical document “Need for Security”, from 1935, where it was clearly summoned that “the one almost all-embracing measure of security is an assured income. A program of economic security, as we vision it, must have as its primary aim the assurance of an adequate income to each human being in childhood, youth, middle age, or old age—in sickness or in health.”
From the paper synopsis it can be read:
This concept paper examines the possibility of providing a base level of income to certain subsets of, and perhaps to all, U.S. citizens as a means to increasing their economic security. The authors begin by highlighting the extent of contemporary financial insecurity and continue with a discussion on how an assured income program might complement existing social insurance and social assistance programs. This is followed by an examination of past and present programs that share goals with the assured income concept described, and an exploration of how these programs might provide a basis for the Social Security Administration’s administering an assured income benefit.
More information at:
William Arnone, Peter Barnes, Renée Landers and Griffin Murphy, “Assured Income”, National Academy of Social Insurance, March 2019
I’m posting chapters of my latest book project (The Prehistory of Private Property coauthored by Grant. S. McCall)
This discussion paper is a draft of Chapter 2 of our forthcoming book, the Prehistory of Private Property. It traces the history of the appropriation story in property theory from John Locke to the present day. It shows that, although the story is not supposed to be literally true, it is meant illustrate important empirical claims in the natural rights justification of private property. The natural-rights-based argument for ethical limits on government powers to tax, regulate, and redistribute property has to stand on the empirical claim that collective appropriation of property, though possible, is historically implausible—a claim or a collection of claims we call “the appropriation hypothesis.”
This hypothesis could be specified in at least three different ways. First, before governments or any other collective institutions appear, all or most resources are appropriated by individuals acting as individuals to established private property rights. Second, only individuals acting as individuals perform appropriative acts (i.e. neither individuals acting as monarchs nor groups intending to establish collective, public, or government-held property rights perform appropriative acts). Third, even if collectives perform appropriative acts, subsequent transfers of titles (in the absence of rights violations) are likely only to produce privatized property rights.
This chapter sets up the following questions, which will be addressed in the chapters 3, 4, & 5: Can the natural-rights justification of private property do without the appropriation hypothesis? And if not, are these claims true?
My latest book project (coauthored by the anthropologist, Grant S. McCall) is called The Prehistory of Private Property. It book tells two parallel histories. It tells the story of how modern property theory became dependent on three misconceptions about the origin of the property rights system and the difference between societies with common and privatized resources, and how those misconceptions continue to have a negative effect on contemporary political thought and beliefs about our shared responsibility. The second story traces the origin and development of the private property system through history and prehistory to debunk those misconceptions.
The three claims at the center of this book are: 1. The normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world we live in can only support a capitalist system with strong private property rights. 2. Capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system. 3. Inequality is natural and inevitable, or egalitarianism is unsustainable without a significant loss in freedom.
The book devotes a great deal of space to show how these misconceptions are embedded in many influential theories in political philosophy, because political philosophers are often unclear about the extent to which their theories rely on empirical claims. The clarity problem is nearly as important as the dubious nature of the claims. Obscurity and ambiguity help shield these claims from scrutiny.
Underlying this specific theoretical agenda is the more general goal of raising the level of discussion of empirical issues in political philosophy. Ambiguous allusions to empirical claims should be unacceptable in any academic literature. Philosophers have the responsibility to be clear about what empirical claims they rely on and about the level of support they can offer for those claims. Their critics should not let them get away with the sloppy use of ambiguous allusions to empirical claims.
Once the need for each claim is clearly established, the book subjects each claim to rigorous empirical investigation using the best evidence available from anthropology, and then discusses the implications of those findings for contemporary theory. Some of the book’s central findings follow.
The normative principles of appropriation and transfer much more easily support common or collective claims to property. Private property rights systems tend not to develop without state aggression against small-scale societies with better claims of a connection to “original appropriation” than people establishing individualist private property rights.
The hunter-gatherer band economy is more consistent with negative freedom than any other form of socio-political organization known to anthropology. If freedom is an overriding value, everyone must become a nomadic hunter-gatherer. This finding implies both that the justification of any other system must rely at least partially on some other value such as opportunity and that aid to the disadvantaged is not necessarily freedom-reducing: it often counteracts freedom-reducing aspects of private property.
Inequality is not natural nor inevitable nor in conflict with freedom. Contemporary egalitarian theory can benefit from the experience of small-scale societies that successfully maintain very high levels of political, social, and economic equality.
The book is not directly about Basic Income, but it will connect to the idea in the final chapter. We will argue that the mass of humanity lead lives of manufactured desperation. People are not naturally in a struggle to “find work” to ensure they have food, shelter, and clothing. They are artificially put in this situation by a stratified property rights system that is not necessary for human social organization and that most societies (from the earliest hunter-gatherers to more recent peasant farming systems) did not find it necessary to manufacture such desperation. Basic Income is one way to compensate people for the imposition of a stratified property system and to relieve them of desperation that has come with it.
We have full drafts of 8 of the books ten chapters, and we are positing them online at this link as they reach presentable form. We hope to have a full draft we can send to our publisher (Edinburgh University Press) within a few weeks or months.
Enzo grills Karl at the PPA+ conference, Amsterdam, 2019
