by Karl Widerquist | Apr 18, 2013 | Research
Philippe Van Parijs
“Rediscovering The Utopian In Europe: An Interview With Philippe Van Parijs,” Global: The Global Journal. March 26, 2013
According to the author, “Philippe Van Parijs is a central figure in the worlds of philosophy and politics alike. Described by Amartya Sen as ‘one of the most original and creative thinkers of our time,’ he is famous for his defense of a Universal Basic Income – an unconditional monthly grant allocated to all – as the best expression of social justice and freedom. Building on the thought-provoking exchange between Francis Fukuyama and Jürgen Habermas published in May, this special extended interview challenges us to imagine a fairer future for the European project.”
https://theglobaljournal.net/article/view/1038/
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jan 7, 2013 | Opinion
BIEN now stands for ‘Basic Income Earth Network’. Once every two years BIEN holds a congress, and this year’s showed just how appropriate the name now is and how inappropriate it would be to still call it the ‘Basic Income European Network’. There were participants from South Africa, Namibia, India, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, Latin America, and numerous European countries. Over three hundred in all gathered for forty-eight hours of plenary sessions, workshops and panels: often six different workshops and panels at one time, with three or four speakers each, to enable all of the papers to be delivered and discussed.
The congress was titled ‘Pathways to a Basic Income’. There was a sort of pattern to the timetable. Friday’s sessions were largely on the current state of the debate, Saturday on routes towards implementation of a Citizen’s Income, and Sunday on a Citizen’s Income’s relationships with such vital themes as ecology, rights, justice, and democracy: but nothing is that tidy, and each day contained a wide diversity of presentations and discussions touching on all of those areas.
The high point was a set of presentations by Guy Standing and representatives of India’s Self Employed Workers Association on the Indian Universal Cash Transfers pilot project and on some of the interim results. Of all of the sessions that I attended this one got by far the longest applause. The other high point, though a rather lower key presentation, was the significant story of Iran’s Citizen’s Income told by Hamid Tabatabai during one of the panel sessions.
The Congress was a quite inspiring mixture of the visionary and the realistic, of the broad-brush and the detailed, of the theoretical and the practical, and Germany’s Netzwerk Grundeinkommen (Basic Income Network) is to be congratulated on organising such a highly successful event.
by Karl Widerquist | Nov 19, 2012 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
My new book, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory Of Freedom as the Power to Say No, now has a release date of February 28, 2013. Although I have edited or coauthored six other books, this is the first book I’ve written all by myself. It is also the first published book in which I begin to outline—however tentatively—my theory of justice. The basic income guarantee is intimately tied up with this theory of justice, and so I would like to take this opportunity to explain some of the background that led me to write it.
I don’t know exactly when I began thinking about the ideas that made their way into this book. The general philosophical outlook is something that has been bouncing around in my head for a long time. The outlook didn’t appear as a whole at any one point; it gradually developed. My interest in social justice began when I was a kid. My parents were politically interested, liberal Christians (a rarity these days). They, my brother, my sister, and I regularly discussed politics around the dinner table. Growing up in that context in the 1970s, I was optimistic about the progress the United States had made against racism, and I began to believe that the biggest problem remaining in most democratic countries is the horrible way we treat the poor.
The television series “Free to Choose,” by Milton Friedman, first introduced me to the idea of a guaranteed income, which is now more commonly known as the basic income guarantee. He presented it mostly as a way to simplify the welfare system, but having thought about it over the years, I began to see it as the centerpiece of a just society and a serious challenge to the Left: If we really care about other people in society, we should care about them unconditionally. The effort that has so far resulted in this book is a self-exploration of why I think this perspective is so important.
As I see it, from the hanging gardens of Babylon to the modern sweatshop, one social problem occurs over and over again in different ways: advantaged people force disadvantaged people to serve them. Can this be justified? I find the social contract answer extremely dissatisfying: it’s OK to force people to do things as long as you can imagine conditions under which they would have signed a contract subjecting themselves to force.
For some time I thought I was a libertarian, but I eventually came to see the Right-libertarians, who call themselves “libertarians” in the United States, in a similar light as social contract theorists. I find their answer even more dissatisfying: it’s OK for owners to force the propertyless to do things, because someone did something before we were all born to give owners special rights over the Earth and its resources, so that the propertyless have no right to refuse the duty to serve owners. Right-libertarians talk about freedom from force, but they invite everyone to ignore the tremendous amount of freedom-threatening force involved in the establishment and maintenance of property rights to the earth and all its products. Without rectifying this issue, “libertarianism” becomes the defense of privilege at the expense of liberty.
Although these issues were important to me, I didn’t do much direct work on social justice until the mid-1990s, when Michael Lewis, Pam Donovan, and I decided to have weekly breakfasts to talk about the progress we were making on our theses. These discussions usually turned to politics, and one day we found the one thing we could all agree on was an unconditional basic income guarantee. So, Michael Lewis and I wrote a paper on it that was eventually published (about ten years later and in heavily revised form) as “An Efficiency Argument for the Basic Income Guarantee,” in International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment.
One paper on the basic income guarantee led to another as well as to involvement with the Basic Income Earth Network and to writing the Newsletter for the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network. I read a lot of impressive literature on basic income, but none of it quite seemed to articulate the reasons I thought it was so important. So, I had to explore my ideas further.
In 2001, I held a half-year fellowship at the Chaire Hoover at the Catholic University of Lovain in Belgium. By this time I had realized that my interest in economics was secondary to my interest in social justice, and I decided that the best way to work full-time on social justice was to go back to graduate school and get a doctorate in political theory. Getting a second doctorate still feels like a crazy idea, but in hindsight, it was the right thing for me. I started at Oxford in October 2002, and by April 2006 I completed a doctoral thesis entitled “Property and the Power to Say No: A Freedom-Based Argument for Basic Income,” which is my initial statement of the theory of justice as the pursuit of accord. Many of the ideas in this book appeared first in that thesis—often in a slightly different form.
I have discussed these ideas with so many friends, colleagues, students, and mentors that I can’t possibly name everyone who has influenced this book. If I’ve discussed politics or philosophy with you in my lifetime, you might have influenced this book in some way. So, thanks.
Since leaving Oxford, I have continued to rework and extend the ideas from my thesis on and off while working on other projects. Not long after Laurie Harting of Palgrave Macmillan approached me about becoming series editor for their new book series Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee, I thought about turning my thesis into a book. In the spring of 2012, I set out to do that, but as I revised it, I found that the chapters in the first half were growing and splitting into more chapters.
I finally realized that the book would be an extension of the first half of my thesis—concentrating on an exploration of the theory of freedom I call “effective control self-ownership” or “personal independence” and leaving the development of most of the rest of justice as the pursuit of accord for later works. Effective Control Self-Ownership is a theory of freedom that makes the freedom from directly or indirectly forced service central to an individual’s standing as a free person. The book defines, derives, and defends this theory of freedom in the context of the contemporary literature on freedom and justice. It examines the implications of the theory and argues that a basic income guarantee is an important tool to maintain personal independence in a modern society.
Now that the book is almost ready to be released, I still feel that it is tentative in many ways. I could spend years revising it, but it is best to get it out. Although tentative, it is a sincere expression of my beliefs on the issues discussed at this point. I hope to explore these ideas much more in the future.
-Karl Widerquist, Mojo’s Coffee House, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 2012; revised onboard a flight from Dallas to London, November 2012
by Guest Contributor | Nov 5, 2012 | Opinion
What would you call a national leader who knows a simple policy that could be implemented at no additional cost that would end poverty, but who refuses to advocate for or even to support that policy? Willfully ignorant? Ideologically blind? A sociopath?
In a campaign speech in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 24, Paul Ryan, the Republican Party Nominee for Vice-President of the United States of America, criticized the Obama administration’s ideological approach to dealing with poverty, placing it within a half-century of liberal attempts to alleviate poverty, stretching back to at least Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Ryan stated that the war on poverty had been won by poverty. As specific proof of the failure of government intervention against poverty, Ryan stated, “Just last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested programs came in at more than one trillion dollars. How much is that in practical terms? For that amount of money, you could give every poor American a check for $22,000.”
The Republican ticket believes they can reduce taxes by 5 trillion dollars, increase military spending by 2 trillion dollars, keep Social Security and MediCare spending at current rates, and reduce the national debt all by closing tax loopholes and eliminating deductions. So their math should not be automatically assumed to be correct. But to be charitable, I will do so anyway.
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the poverty rate for a single individual in the 48 contiguous states is $11,170 for 2012, and $23,050 for a family of four. And if sending every poor person a check for $22,000 were administered through the Internal Revenue Service in people’s federal income tax returns, it would be a lot simpler and cheaper than the IRS’s administration of the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the many means-tested programs that would presumably be eliminated to pay for the $22,000 payment. Even if the extreme work disincentive of an all-or-nothing grant were nearly eliminated by reducing it to a mere $12,000 and making it universal but with a 50% take-back rate, it would still be much simpler than the EITC. So Paul Ryan just explained how the United States could literally end poverty by fiat without spending any more money than it already is and with a massive savings in bureaucratic spending. So is this what the Romney-Ryan ticket proposes to do for America?
No. This explanation for how to end poverty was used only to show the ineffectiveness of the current government approaches to poverty. But Ryan did not actually propose ending poverty via this method in his speech. Neither he nor Romney have ever proposed anything like the plan he described to end poverty. In fact, in this speech, the closest thing to an alternative vision Ryan offered for dealing with poverty was to suggest school vouchers. He claimed the way for people to escape poverty is through education, and noted that he and Romney supported educational “choice”. Data from the famous SIME-DIME basic income studies suggest that Ryan has the causal relationship between escaping poverty and improving educational achievement backwards. A basic income was shown to be a highly cost-effective means of increasing grades for children in the families studied.
Is Ryan really so sociopathic? A more charitable, and more likely, explanation is ideological blindness. Ryan may actually be bothered by poverty, but he likely views “income redistribution” as simply wrong. In this, his thinking would be similar to that of Thomas Jefferson, who understood intellectually that slavery was morally wrong, but who also believed it to be morally wrong for the state to take a person’s property. The mutual mistake made by Jefferson and Ryan is the belief that “property” exists as a moral imperative created prior to either mutual agreement or imposition by threat of force.
The convention of property is a very good idea that most often enhances both economic incentives and personal freedom. But a convention is all that it is, and when certain forms of property interfere with economic incentives or personal freedoms, those forms of property need to be eliminated or reformed. The nation of England has traditionally treated titles of nobility as forms of personal property, but when the United States was founded, we eliminated such forms of property from our existence. Nine decades later, we eliminated the form of property known as slavery from our existence. Current forms of government created property such as land titles, patents, and shares in government chartered corporations are probably still on balance good ideas and do not need to be eliminated entirely. But they still benefit the few who utilize them at the expense of the public who created them. Demanding that such forms of property be reformed to require full compensation to those who are displaced is not asking for handouts from the makers. It is asking for payment from the takers. It is demanding justice.
by Yannick Vanderborght | Oct 3, 2012 | News
The first two sessions are now available as replay, both slides and audio. Here are the links: (You may need to Control Click on the URL or copy and paste into your browser.)
August 5 – Session One – https://instantteleseminar.com/?eventid=33395637
I. Economics and Conscious Evolution – series overview; Module 1 of Land Rights online course; land rights and the person/planet relationship; PROUT’s social psychology and evolution of the social cycle.
Guest Speakers: Michael Towsey (Australia), Acharya Santosananda (India)
September 2 – Session Two – https://attendthisevent.com/?eventid=32626596
II. The Wealth Divide – poverty and economic inequality within the US and Africa; The Enclosures; the “resource curse” and the corruption of economics; the “law of rent”; addressing the land problem; cooperatives.
Guest Speakers: Gordon Abiama (Nigeria), Acharya Maheshverananda (Venezuela)
Date, theme and speakers for upcoming Session Three:
October 7
III. Sharing the Commons – separative consciousness and genocide; unity consciousness and commoning; property rights paradigm shift; land value capture and commons trusts; jubilee justice public finance policies; sharing and caring for each other and the world’s resources.
Guest Speakers: Kevin Annett (Canada), Lisinka Ulatowska (Netherlands)
Date and Time: Sunday, October 7th at 4:00pm Eastern, 1:00pm Pacific, 9:00pm UK
(For other time zones you can go to the online World Clock.)
To attend go to:
https://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventID=33631509
PIN Code (session ID): 090366# (if required)
This mode of access enables you to listen to the webcast and view the slides. You may communicate with us via typing into the Question and Answers box.
To prepare for Session Three you may scroll through Module Three of the Land Rights Course here: https://www.course.earthrights.net Your free Land Rights course access is included with the teleseminar. This is the password: earthrights. Please let us know if you have any difficulty accessing the course.
Also, please do your best to find time to view HIDDEN NO LONGER, a film about our guest speaker Kevin Annett and the Canadian genocide of Native American children who attended church and state sponsored schools. Http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=9vNW9meqny4&feature=endscreen
We suggest that you print out this page and post it as a reminder to join us on October 7th.
Thank you for your interest in the Sustainable Economics Teleseminars!
From co-hosts Wendell Fitzgerald and Alanna Hartzok and the Conscious Evolution Teleseminar Group.
(If you are not yet registered for this teleseminar series you may do so by contacting alanna(at)earthrights.net)
