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Re: Could - Universal Basic Income be the cure?
Posted by diogenes on 2025-July-14 17:10:01, MondayIn reply to Could - Universal Basic Income be the cure? posted by Popcorn on 2025-July-14 15:39:57, Monday
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UBI is a superb idea, not because it will do anything about the abuse industry, but because it will make it much easier for people to pursue goals that are meaningful but which do not generate GDP, such as raising a family. To my knowledge, the first person to suggest it was Bertrand Russell in his 1918 book Roads to Freedom. After a careful and detailed analysis of Marxian socialism, anarchism and syndicalism, he expounds in some detail a model of social organisation that leans most heavily on anarchist ideas, with the greatest possible liberty for the individual. Though he still believes a framework of law and order would be necessary, he hoped that a more civilised social order would be able to reduce the coercive functions of government to a minimum. Under the proposed regime, work hours would be reduced and most production would be organised by the workers themselves in a system of guilds. Under such a system, work itself would become less repulsive than it now is for the majority. But there is no reason whatever why even idlers should not be supported at public expense: the necessaries of life should be free, as Anarchists desire, to all equally, regardless of whether they work or not. Under this plan, every man could live without work: there would be what might be called a "vagabond's wage,'' sufficient for existence but not for luxury. The artist who preferred to have his whole time for art and enjoyment might live on the "vagabond's wage'' -- traveling on foot when the humour seized him to see foreign countries, enjoying the air and the sun, as free as the birds, and perhaps scarcely less happy. Such men would bring colour and diversity into the life of the community; their outlook would be different from that of steady, stay-at-home workers, and would keep alive a much-needed element of light-heartedness which our sober, serious civilization tends to kill. If they became very numerous, they might be too great an economic burden on the workers; but I doubt if there are many with enough capacity for simple enjoyments to choose poverty and freedom in preference to the comparatively light and pleasant work which will be usual in those days. (Roads to Freedom, Unwin paperbacks, 1977, pp.133-134)Russell continued to argue against the work ethic and in favour of the gospel of laziness in such books as In Praise of Idleness (1935). (As well as Roads to Freedom I would also recommend Philip Ironside's The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: the development of an aristocratic liberalism, though I find myself much more in favour of Russell's ideas, including the universal income, than Ironside himself.) Labour's 2019 manifesto included a commitment to introduce a UBI scheme in one of the regions, and to potentially expand it if it were deemed a success. The Belgian economist and political philosopher Philippe Van Parijs has championed UBI and demonstrated in some detail both its justice and its feasibility in his many works.  |
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