by Tyler Prochazka | Nov 29, 2015 | News
“Tom Woods by Gage Skidmore 3” by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Woods_by_Gage_Skidmore_3.jpg#/media/File:Tom_Woods_by_Gage_Skidmore_3.jpg
Libertarians are known for their general skepticism toward government programs. However, some libertarians have still flirted with the idea of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) as an alternative to the current welfare state. Tom Woods, a noted advocate of libertarianism, recently debated BIG advocate Matt Zwolinski on his podcast.
Zwolinski argued that a BIG can be defended from the standpoint of pragmatic politics from the standpoint of justice. He suggested a plan in the vein of that recommended by libertarian economist Charles Murray: an annual $10,000 cash payment to every American adult.
Woods challenged Zwolinski on the basis that a BIG would violate an individual’s right to the fruits of their labor.
Zwolinski responded that many libertarians hold “idealized” accounts of how individuals accumulated property in the past, ignoring the injustices created as property was and is distributed. A BIG could alleviate some of the inequality caused by these injustices, Zwolinski argued.
Taking on a Georgist position, Zwolinski said that property cannot be fully owned. Ignoring the unjust way property came about and failing to rectify it through a policy like a BIG is a “rationalization of privilege,” he said.
For the full YouTube video of the podcast, click here.
by Will Wachtmeister | Nov 21, 2015 | Opinion
A Swedish Green Party motion to investigate basic income policy options has injected new life into the UBI debate in Sweden. Several established commentators are finally engaging with the issue after a long period of ignoring or instantly dismissing the idea.
The Greens called for an inquiry into the effects of introducing a basic income at their party conference over the summer which predictably – given the political climate in Sweden – attracted much knee-jerk ridicule.
Swedish public intellectual Roland Paulsen
However, recently several heavy-hitting publications have run opinion pieces on the issue even if most are negative.
The debate has clearly been spurred on by additional factors such as moves towards basic income in neighboring Finland. There has also been tireless campaign work carried out by Swedish grassroots civil society groups and media advocacy by a number of public intellectuals, notably Roland Paulsen.
Well-established evening newspaper Expressen, a popular centre-right publication, this month ran an in-depth pro-UBI essay by Malin Ekman arguing that “a basic income for all” is far more realistic than “jobs for all” in tomorrow’s digital economy. The paper’s main national politics commentator has in the past dismissed the Greens’ basic income proposal as “immature” without further comment.
The moderate-conservative broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet earlier ran an in-depth essay by the center-right Center Party’s chief economist who called the implications of the basic income proposal “devastating for the economy and the environment” and said it reflected the Greens’ supposed “muzzy and unworldly” approach to politics.
The left-leaning cultural magazine Arena has also attacked basic income with an opinion piece by a macroeconomist saying UBI supporters were keeping silent about Sweden’s major refugee crisis because they knew their policy would only make the situation more difficult.
The nascent debate is taking place in a context where the prime minister’s Social Democratic Party remains wedded to its traditional active labor market approach, and a mix of demand-led and supply-side economic policies, to combat unemployment. The center-left government, which includes the Green Party, has set a goal of reducing unemployment to five percent by 2020, a target that has been widely condemned as unrealistic.
Further reading in SWEDISH:
Malin Ekman, “Medborgarlön allt mer realistiskt instrument” [Citizen’s income getting increasingly realistic as a policy] Expressen, 2 November 2015
Karl-Gösta Bergström, “Miljöpartiets fem omogna beslut” [Five immature decisions by the Green Party], Expressen, 14 June 2015
Roland Paulsen, “Att straffa de arbetslösa är en grymhet av historiska mått” [Punishing the unemployed is an injustice of historical proportions] Dagens Nyheter, 15 July 2015
Martin Ådahl, “Medborgarlön är dåligt för miljön” [Citizen’s income is bad for the environment] Svenska Dagbladet, 7 October 2015
Anders Bergh, “Därför tror ingen på basinkomst” [Here’s why no-one believes in basic income] Dagens Arena, 2 November 2015
by Andre Coelho | Nov 8, 2015 | News
Paulo de Morais
Presidential candidate Paulo de Morais is focused on corruption and ethics in politics. Interested in social justice and ethical behavior, he has agreed to meet the local group of basic income (BI) activists in Lisbon, to deepen his knowledge on what is BI and how to implement it. Although he objects certain implementation factors for BI in Portugal, as changing certain taxation rules (details here), he presently supports a form of resource-based redistribution of wealth. This redistribution could be considered a BI, although linked with money accrued from managing natural resources, public properties and so on. He clearly states that it is only right to give back to the People what is owned and managed by (or for) the People.
Paulo de Morais argues that financing BI with taxes from income is prone to reactions, linked to giving money to everybody, including alleged idle people. This and constitutional hurdles from redirecting public money to a future kind of BI Fund. Although all these aspects are discussable, he still only supports, for the moment, a BI funded by natural/ownership-based wealth collection.
Together with two other presidential candidates Manuela Gonzaga and Paulo Borges, Paulo de Morais joins a growing number of BI leaning political activists in Portugal.
More information at:
In Portuguese:
Paulo de Morais presidential campaign Facebook page.
Lisboa BI group Facebook page.
by Vito Laterza | Oct 18, 2015 | News
Celebrated Chinese-American community activist, writer and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs died in her house in Detroit, Michigan, on Monday, October 5. She turned 100 in June this year. Her vision of a community-driven socialist alternative to capitalism resonates well with some of the concerns of the basic income movement. While basic income was not a central theme in her work, she endorsed the idea of a city-level universal basic income (UBI).
She was born in New York and grew up in a Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant business. A brilliant scholar, she completed her PhD in philosophy in 1940. After that, she became increasingly drawn into full-time political activism. In 1942, she started her close collaboration with Marxist revolutionary theorist C.L.R. James and the Johnsonites, which lasted for two decades. The Johnsonites were revolutionary socialists who focused more than other Marxist groups on marginalized groups like women, people of color and youth, and rejected the notion of a workers’ vanguard party.
Lee Boggs’ personal encounter with Marxism and socialism was shaped by a focus on race and poverty, in particular the systematic discrimination faced by black American working class communities. In 1953, she married Detroit-based black activist and autoworker Jimmy Boggs, author of the influential 1963 book The American revolution: pages from a Negro worker’s notebook. In the same year she moved to Detroit to live with him. The city remained her home until her death. Grace and Jimmy partnered in community activism, political struggles and revolutionary writing.
Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Grace and Jimmy were prominent in organizing the civil rights and Black Power movements in Detroit. They collaborated with towering figures like Martin Luther King and Malcom X, and organizations like the Black Panthers. After the decline of mass political activism that started in the 1980s, they continued to focus on community work and alternative urban livelihoods. Jimmy passed away in 1993, and Grace continued with these activities until her death.
In a 2011 piece, Grace Lee Boggs mentions a workshop presentation in the early 1990s in which she had imagined a future where Detroiters would come together to implement a city-wide UBI by the year 2015:
Because Detroiters have developed a deep sense of moral responsibility, citizens decided in 2015 A.D. to adopt a Universal Basic Income Grant (UBIG) as an alternative to welfare. The UBIG is based on the idea that every citizen has a right to the basic material necessities of life, including health care and education, and every citizen also has a duty to share in the responsibilities of the community, city, nation and planet, and to contribute in some form to the overall well-being.
Lee Boggs’ engagement with UBI was more complex than her words above let transpire. Her take was heavily influenced by evolving ideas about work, community and the rejection of the capitalist system. Her socialist approach was informed by Marx’s critique of alienation and wage labor under capitalism. Lee Boggs’ association with black working class communities became a pragmatic entry point into the concept and practice of revolution – which she always saw as something changing, shifting and emerging from uncertainty, rather than a linear path driven by monolithic ideas. Revolution, for Lee Boggs, was what people did on the ground when they took practical action informed by a long-term vision of the society they wanted to build.
Her work speaks to UBI activists because she lived through the decline of formal jobs in the Detroit automotive industry, and the social and economic devastation black communities experienced as a result. In the 1960s, all the signs of the crisis were clear, with black workers losing their jobs in large numbers due to automation and other irreversible structural changes in global capitalist production. In the following years, Lee Boggs was particularly concerned with the dramatic contradictions emerging from the decline of formal labor coupled by rampant consumerism. She identified the capitalist system as the main cause of the breakdown of communities plagued by mass unemployment, crime and drugs.
The Boggses led decades of urban renewal experiments emerging from the ashes of capitalism and focusing on youth entrepreneurship, urban agriculture and community education. Where others saw a post-industrial wasteland, they saw opportunities to build a new society that would break away from consumerism and dependence on large-scale structures like the state and big companies. The James & Grace Lee Boggs School and the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership are among the many projects that carry their legacy today.
The basic income grant that Lee Boggs envisioned was to be delivered by self-governing Detroiters coming together, not as a large-scale redistributive mechanism at state or federal level. It was closely tied to the duty to participate and share with others locally and globally, and to behave responsibly towards other humans and the natural environment. The strong connections between UBI and the community would have neutralized the potential negative effects of linking cash grants to mass production and global capitalism.
In a 2012 talk at the New School in New York, Lee Boggs provided the following comment on Martin Luther King’s proposal of a guaranteed annual income (something quite close to a federal UBI):
I’m not sure I’m ready to propose a guaranteed annual wage. I think that’s too simplistic. … I think we need to do a lot more with ourselves, with our economy, and envisioning a new kind of economy. You can think so much in terms of re-distribution. Or you can begin thinking about justice in terms of restoring another way of life.
Whether one agrees with Lee Boggs’ communitarian conception of UBI or not, her work is a major contribution to basic income debates. Lee Boggs’ writings emphasized the dignity of work, and how its redemptive qualities had little to do, if at all, with wage labor. On the topic of change, she was an advocate of “visionary organizing.” She believed that community activism in the “here and now” could bring about global systemic change only if driven by a strong vision of the future to come. Her mature views about revolution and social change are presented in her powerful book The next American revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century, first published in 2011.
Her radiant presence and profound insight will be sorely missed. She influenced basic income advocates like Scott Santens, who celebrated her life work with these words: “Some people see where the arc of history should bend, do all they can to make it bend, and live long enough to see it bend.” She will continue to inspire thousands of UBI activists engaged in small-scale experiments that are already sowing the seeds of a future world where UBI becomes the norm.
Grace Lee Boggs in post-industrial Detroit. Credit: Quyen Tran. © PBS POV
Essential readings
Grace Lee Boggs, “Visionary organizing and the MLK Memorial,” James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, September 2011.
Grace Lee Boggs, “Jobs aren’t the answer,” James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, September 2011.
Grace Lee Boggs at the New School, New York [TRANSCRIPT], April 22, 2012.
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for change: an autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Grace Lee Boggs (with Scott Kurashige), The next American revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011.
Documentary film “American Revolutionary: the evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” directed by Grace Lee, June 2013.
Ryan Felton, “Grace Lee Boggs, longtime Detroit activist, dies aged 100,” The Guardian, October 6, 2015.
Michelle Chen, “Grace Lee Boggs’ century of social renewal,” Al Jazeera America, October 7, 2015.
Thomas J. Sugrue, “Postscript: Grace Lee Boggs,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2015.
Barbara Ransby, “The (r)evolutionary vision and contagious optimism of Grace Lee Boggs,” In These Times, October 6, 2015.
Jordan Weissmann, “Martin Luther King’s economic dream: a guaranteed income for all Americans,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2013.
by Toru Yamamori | Oct 7, 2015 | News
Jaemyoung Lee, Mayor of Seongnam City, announced to implement Youth Dividend at a press conference on the first day of October 2015. He informed the purpose, goal and way of Youth Dividend, and proposed that the national government should implement it as well.
Every person aged 19-24 who has lived at the city at least for three years will receive kw 250,000 (about $ 230) quarterly (total kw 1,000,000 a year) without any means-test or work requirement. In this sense, Youth Dividend aims to realize the basic income idea which is different to the previous selected welfare policy, although its amount is very small.
This scheme will be implemented year by year from 24s, because the city has not sufficient fund. According to the statistics, there are about 70,000 aged 19-24 having lived at least for three years and among them 24s are 11,300. So more than kw 60 bn budget will be required to pay kw 1,000,000 to everyone aged 19-24. The city has a plan to carry it out optimizing the budget.
Youth Dividend has two fold goals. It has aims to “expand the welfare for the young people so that they could have more opportunities for raising their qualification” and to “stimulate the local economy by the way of paying Youth Dividend in electronic money which could be only used within the city.”
This scheme has another effect as well. Criticizing President Park’s ‘Hopeful Fund for the Youth’ which is regarded as a philanthropic disguise, Mayor Lee proposed “the central government should adapt Youth Dividend to resolve the so called youth problem fundamentally.”
Korean government pushes ahead with Hopeful Fund for the Youth to conduct practical education for the young people who want to get a job or run their own business through the citizen’s donation. Mayor Lee sharply criticized it, because it gives up the responsibility of government. “The youth problem cannot be resolved by the philanthropic donation”, he said. And “the central government has responsibility to take care of it for the continuous development of the society.”
Two issues, the limitation of regional government budget and the tax justice, are behind his claim that the national government should take Youth Dividend as its program. Mayor Lee said “we should assure the money on the ground of strict tax justice” for resolving the youth problem. For example, if we raise the current rate of 22 percent of corporate tax to 25 percent, we could have a considerable amount of money. Indeed, Korean government has lowered the rate of corporate tax in past years.
There need to pass through another two processes to implement actually Youth Dividend. On the one hand, Seongnam City has to make “an arrangement” with the Ministry of Health and Welfare and on the other hand, the statute of Youth Dividend should be passed in the city council. Seongnam City applied an arrangement with the Ministry on the 24th September and made pre-announcement of legislation of ‘Youth Dividend Statute’ on the 29th.
The reason that Seongnam City has to have an arrangement with Ministry of Health and Welfare is because Article 26 of Social Security Act in Korea regulates the related process. According to it, any regional government which has a plan to make a new social welfare scheme or to change the current programs has to make an arrangement with the Ministry. But the Ministry has de facto power to permit, although the Act contains the expression, “arrangement.” We have lots of cases in which welfare programs in regional government could not be carried out face with the Ministry’s opposition.
So we are afraid of the arrangement process, because current Korean government is so authoritarian and neoliberal. But if the process will be completed as we wish, we have an opportunity to realize the basic income idea here in Korea, even though not sufficient.
[Written by Seonmi Park in Korean and translated by Hyosang Ahn (Both are members of Basic Income Korean Network)]
