The general idea behind the theory of Universal Basic Income (UBI),
which I’ve written about in two previous blogs —http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2017/06/universal-basic-incomeintroduction-to.html and http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2017/07/milton-friedman-conservative-voice-for.html— is that it should be unconditional. For this reason,
some economists and political philosophers translate the UBI acronym as
Unconditional Basic Income. The majority of proponents of the idea agree on
this single point.
The most socially sound reason for this is that UBI is a way of ensuring
a universal alternative to abject poverty. But the best economic argument in
favor of UBI is a very practical one: By providing all citizens, no matter what
their economic or social conditions might be, with a basic form of subsistence,
the enormous bureaucracy currently involved in vetting the beneficiaries of
social welfare programs would be vastly reduced, as would the budget necessary
to maintain that bureaucracy. This could potentially generate billions of
dollars in savings and make social welfare expenditure much simpler and
exceedingly more effective, allowing social aid funds to go directly to
citizens rather than sticking to the fingers of the agencies currently charged
with doling them out to “the worthy”.
Beyond this point of almost unanimous consensus, however, there are
numerous viewpoints on why UBI is an idea that has come of age, on how to
implement it, and on what its advantages could be to society worldwide. In this
article, I want to share a few of the most salient opinions today from UBI theorists
considered worldwide experts on the subject.
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| Rutger Bregman |
One of the foremost promoters of UBI is Dutch-born researcher Rutger
Bregman. Not yet 30 years old, Bregman is already renowned as a journalist,
historian and author. His History of Progress was awarded the
Belgian Liberales Prize for best
non-fiction book of 2013, and his Utopia for Realists has become an
international bestseller with translations into more than a score of languages.
He is credited with generating an unconditional basic income movement that has
drawn worldwide attention.
In Utopia for Realists,
Bregman attempts to put aside right-wing and left-wing divisions and to
demonstrate with hard facts and successful examples that many new ideas dubbed
“utopian” by the naysayers—e.g., a 15-hour work week and universal basic
income—are implementable and practical ideas whose time has come. Bregman
develops his theory from the premise that practically everything today is
better than it has been throughout 99 percent of prior history. This is hardly
a view shared by many people in the West today who see things as “going
downhill fast”, with dwindling jobs, concentration of wealth at the top,
shrinking pay-scales, the hazards of global climate change, rising rightwing
populism and a burgeoning global population topping their list of concerns.
But Bregman posits that “for roughly 99 percent of the world’s history,
99 percent of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly.”
He claims that all of this has changed in the last two centuries and that the
change has been on a progressively positive trend: “Billions of us,” he says,
“are suddenly rich, well-nourished, clean, safe, smart, healthy, and
occasionally even beautiful. Where 84 percent of the world population still
lived in extreme poverty in 1820, by 1981 that percentage had dropped to 44
percent, and now, just a few decades later, it is under 10 percent.”
While this may be a highly optimistic viewpoint that would certainly beg
debate in many circles —especially among aid groups struggling to raise funds
to feed the world’s hungry and shelter more than 60 million refugees from war
and poverty-devastated nations— it is in line with his principal argument that
every milestone in civilization was at one time considered “a utopian fantasy”,
and that like those other achievements, UBI is destined to become a workable and
commonplace reality.
His stance is juxtaposed to that of populist right-wingers like Marine
Le Pen, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, who seek a return to “how things used to
be.” His solutions are simple and clear. “Poverty,” he says, “isn’t a lack of
character. It’s a lack of cash.” And his idea for lifting people out of poverty
is to simply give everybody free money to ensure their subsistence.
I mentioned here last time that this was an idea shared by an iconic
conservative US economist, the late Milton Friedman. But many young people
would still be shocked to know that the largest country that ever came the
closest to implementing UBI nationwide was, indeed, the United States and that
the proposal for doing so wasn’t made by a liberal but by one of the country’s
most conservative Republican presidents, Richard Nixon. Bregman tells how Nixon
twice sent a universal basic income bill to Congress, managing to push it
through the House of Representatives both times, only to see it blocked in the
Senate because Democrats deemed the cash amount of the UBI proposed to be too
little.
I plan to write in further detail about the theories that Bregman develops
in Utopia for Realists at some point in
a future, but suffice it for now to say that what he posits is the
simplification of the “welfare state” into a system by which every person has a
right to basic subsistence. He indicates that the current system is failing
because it applies a “standard of progress” from another era, the wartime era
of World War II. The fact that the war has been over for the past seven decades
means that “our statistics no longer capture the shape of our economy” and,
according to Bregman, this reality has consequences.
Each era needs its own set of statistics, he argues. Speaking of which,
he makes his case for UBI statistically clear: “Eradicating poverty in the US
would cost only about $175 billion, less than 1 percent of the GDP.” And, I
might add, over four times less than the big banking bailout cost the US
following the crash of 2007. Bregman adds that “winning the war on poverty
would be a bargain compared to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which a Harvard
study estimated have cost...a staggering $4-$6 trillion.” He further argues
that “all the world’s developed countries had it within their means to wipe out
poverty years ago.”
Many of the voices trumpeting the virtues of UBI belong to economists
and sociologists who form part of what has come to be known as the “libertarian
left”. Left-libertarianism is the name given to a variety of loosely
related but often distinct approaches to both political and social theory. What
these approaches all have in common is their emphasis on social equality and
individual freedoms. While at its far-left fringe, left-libertarianism is
synonymous with libertarian varieties of anarchism and Marxism, when it comes
to the UBI debate, it refers to the ideas of thinkers like Peter Vallentyne,
Hillel Steiner and others who champion self-ownership (they make a not so
subtle distinction between personal property and private property), but
applying egalitarian principles to natural resources, which they consider to be
the birth-right of every individual.
In this brand of left-libertarianism, natural resources are pretty much
defined as land, oil, mineral wealth (including gold) and vegetation. By and
large, they believe that such resources should be subject to egalitarian rules
and should either not have owners or should be owned collectively as in
Marxist-style orthodoxy. The most liberal and progressive of these
left-libertarians support private property, even as it applies to natural
resource concessions, but only on the condition that proper compensation
(meaning compensation that actually reaches the individual in a significant
way) be provided to the local community when resources are granted to private
concession-holders.
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| Peter Vallentyne |
A dual citizen of the US and Canada, Dr. Peter Vallentyne, aged 65, is a
native of New Haven, Connecticut, but is currently a professor of philosophy at
the University of Missouri (Columbia, MO). He has also taught at the Virginia
Commonwealth University and at the University of Western Ontario. Having
written and lectured extensively on a wide variety of related issues, he is a
clear-cut proponent of natural resource compensation as a source for universal
basic income funding.
Vallentyne proposes that although all forms of libertarianism reject
“non-consensual taxation of labor and the products of labor,” all but radical
right-wing libertarianism allow a wealth tax on natural resource rights. He
marks the different degrees to which libertarians accept this principle by
saying that “some versions of libertarianism allow the equal and unconditional
distribution of such revenues and some do not.” Vallentyne’s own UBI theory is
a complex one, but it appears to be based on certain clear-cut factors: the
justice of a basic income in the absence of valid consent from those required
to finance it, and endorsement of full self-ownership and full ownership of “the
products of one’s labor,” but not over the natural resources from which these
products are derived.
In other words, he posits that while it would be, perhaps, excessive to
recover all natural resources and bring them under collective ownership, those
with rights to natural resource ownership should pay compensation to individuals
who, by not having such rights, are deprived of the same “opportunity for
well-being” as the natural resource holder. Simply stated, Vallentyne proposes
that “no human agent created natural resources, and there is no reason that the
lucky person who first claims rights over a natural resource, and the
inheritors of those rights, should reap all the benefits that the resource
provides.” Universal Basic Income, then,
should, in Vallentyne’s view, be paid for with taxes levied on the ownership
rights for natural resources—but not on the products of the resource holder’s
labor.
Unlike some other basic income advocates, however, Vallentyne ponders
whether UBI should indeed be universal, or just unconditional, considering
that, perhaps, those with more assets than the norm should receive less or no
UBI benefits. Seen in this way, his plan seems to me to be somewhat less likely
to cut down significantly on bureaucracy because this would presumably involve
a complicated vetting process.
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| Hillel Steiner |
This is a major difference between Vallentyne’s view and that of Hillel
Steiner. Steiner—Canadian-born professor emeritus in political philosophy at
the University of Manchester, who was inducted into the British Academy in
1999—believes that many of the world’s current social problems would be solved
by instituting payment of a basic income to every individual on earth. Says
Steiner, “Unlike the benefit provision of the standard welfare state — a provision conditional on its recipients being ill, single parents,
disabled, unemployed or retired — a UBI is intended to be given to everyone, rich and poor alike.” As
such, he points out, “its administration would be far less costly than that of
any conditional benefit provision since, being universally supplied, UBI would
require no assessment of its recipients’ personal circumstances.”
Another leg of his argument in favor of UBI is simplification of how to
pay for it. For this purpose he espouses the implementation of a blanket Land
Value Taxation (LVT), as the primary source for funding UBI because it
constitutes “the perfect tax” and neutralizes the most often quoted argument
against welfare: namely that it “enables work-shy, able-bodied people to live
parasitically off wealth created by hardworking taxpayers.”
LVT, Hillel posits, “is a levy on the unimproved value of a land site — a levy that, unlike property taxes, disregards the value of buildings,
personal property and other improvements to that site.” In other words, LVT
passes the litmus test of taxing the value of a raw resource, which, according
to the left-libertarian stance, belongs to everyone on earth, without taxing
the fruits of the labor of the holder of that resource. And it provides
compensation to the other stakeholders in that resource who do not have the
same opportunity as the resource-holder to profit from its exploitation.
LVT’s economic efficiency has been recognized since the 18th
century, and numerous economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have
advocated for it. Hillel points out that LVT is most famously associated with
the theories of late-19th-century American economist Henry George, a
journalist-reformer enrolled in the Progressive Era, whose ideas for social
reform were based on the principle that people should own the value of whatever
they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land and natural
resources in general belonged equally to all members of society. Advocates of
LVT still today span the political spectrum between such ideologically
divergent Nobel-laureate economists as Milton Friedman on the right and Joseph
Stiglitz on the left.
These are just a few of the major voices advocating unconditional basic
income. I’ll be examining further stances on the subject in subsequent blog
entries.
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