OPINION: Universal and Guaranteed Income? A Matter of Basic Rights

by Yannick Vanderborght | Apr 30, 2012 | Opinion

The idea of a regular income that allows people to plan and fulfil a life project is a certainly linked to the topic of job markets reform. However, these two issues do not overlap. The reform of job contracts, new economic incentives, liberalization and tax exemptions can make the job market more efficient, but all these tools can not resolve the issue of effective risk of insecurity and irregularity in personal incomes.

Guaranteeing incomes is not the same than guaranteeing jobs: if the issue of income security involves the workers, the precariat, the unemployed, all the young men and women looking for their first job, it does not concern them as workers but as citizens. Or, to put it more precisely, as people with fundamental rights.

All humans, as biological beings, bear unavoidable material needs like housing, food, clothing, universal needs that are one with the human condition. These needs remain with the same urgency despite the ups and downs of the market, the changes in production and the greater or lesser demand of employees. The right to have an income and the right to work, therefore, are not the same because even in the absence of a stable employment, the continuity of income is essential to meet unavoidable basic needs.

People do not need to prove that they deserve fundamental rights. Basic rights are inherent to the dignity that democratic systems recognize to the human person. The rights to basic education and public health care have already been codified in our (Italian) legal system as rights for all, because they create the essential conditions to exercise and enjoy all the other rights that the Italian Constitution and Law recognizes and protects.

The forced slimming cure of our welfare states in this critical economical moment must be accompanied by a revolution in the way of thinking the protection of social rights. We need a more universal welfare state, with less managing costs, less dependent from an inefficient (and often arbitrary) bureaucratic selectivity that has been the main source of corruption and waste of public money over the years.

The universal ex lege recognition of the right to receive a guaranteed basic income would be a first and effective protection against the hazards of market and would build a safety net to prevent people from falling into a state of misery.

The history of liberal-democratic States, and their legal systems, is the history of the recognition of rights to an always more extended group until the moment in which some rights, considered as essential, were recognized as universal. One of the greatest achievements of the legal culture of the 19^th Century was the abolition of slavery in the United States, with the following recognition of civil rights for all, whites and blacks. In the 20^th Century, the universal suffrage represents the extension to all citizens of a basic political right. I see no reasons to stop the process only at civil and political rights. Why is it not possible to admit that at least some socio-economic rights have a similar essential value? Why don’t we make them independent from personal conditions, skills and attitudes as we do with the majority of civil and political rights?

The question of a universal and unconditional income, an income that allows at least to cope with  the most basic necessities of life is unavoidable. Philippe Van Parijs is probably right in saying that it represents the biggest reform that will define the democratic states of the 21^st Century, as the end of slavery and the universal suffrage marked the democratic life of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries.