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rob g

A Basic Income for All | Philippe Van Parijs (2000) - 0 views

bostonreview.net/...vanparijs.html

basic.income freedom economics HumanRights

shared by rob g on 28 Jun 09 - Snapshot
  • productivity, wealth, and national incomes have
    advanced sufficiently far to support an adequate UBI. And if enacted,
    a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice:
    it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources
    that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help
    to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve
    ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.
  • in 1999, the Alaska Permanent Fund paid each
    person of whatever age who had been living in Alaska for at least one
    year an annual UBI of $1,680.
  • By universal basic
    income     I mean an income paid by a government, at a uniform level
    and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society. The grant
    is paid, and its level is fixed, irrespective of whether the person
    is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not.
    In most versions–certainly in mine–it is granted not only
    to citizens, but to all permanent residents.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The idea of the UBI is at least
    150 years old. Its two earliest known formulations were inspired by
    Charles Fourier, the prolific French utopian socialist. In 1848, while
    Karl Marx was finishing off the Communist Manifesto around the corner,
    the Brussels-based Fourierist author Joseph Charlier published Solution
    of the Social Problem    , in which he argued for a "territorial
    dividend" owed to each citizen by virtue of our equal ownership
    of the nation’s territory. The following year, John Stuart Mill
    published a new edition of his Principles of Political Economy,
    which contains a sympathetic presentation of Fourierism ("the most
    skillfully combined, and with the greatest foresight of objections,
    of all the forms of Socialism") rephrased so as to yield an unambiguous
    UBI proposal: "In the distribution, a certain minimum is first
    assigned for the subsistence of every member of the community, whether
    capable or not of labour. The remainder of the produce is shared in
    certain proportions, to be determined beforehand, among the three elements,
    Labour, Capital, and Talent."
  • It was seriously discussed by left-wing academics
    such as G. D. H. Cole and James Meade in England between the World Wars
    and, via Abba Lerner, it seems to have inspired Milton Friedman’s
    proposal for a "negative income tax."    6
    But only since the late-1970s has the idea gained real political currency
    in a number of European countries, starting with the Netherlands and
    Denmark.
  • rob g
    rob g on 28 Jun 09
     
    If you really care about freedom, give people an unconditional income at a level sufficient for subsistence. Productivity, wealth, and national incomes have advanced sufficiently far to support an adequate UBI. And if enacted, a basic income would serve as a powerful instrument of social justice: it would promote real freedom for all by providing the material resources that people need to pursue their aims. At the same time, it would help to solve the policy dilemmas of poverty and unemployment, and serve ideals associated with both the feminist and green movements.
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