Basic Income and Societal Transformation
Introduction
Basic Income is a government issued direct cash grant to each citizen without categorical conditions. Thomas Paine in “Agrarian Justice” first proposed a direct government cash grant to individuals to be given when they reach age 20 and again when they reach age 50. In a modern context, Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, supported a negative income tax as a form of grant as did President Richard Nixon. Martin Luther King advocated a guaranteed annual income. With a more or less permanent “precariat” population living in a technological society, a citizen and their family of any social class may be subject to severe, unexpected economic disruption. A Basic Income policy provides a universal financial baseline for citizens that enhance both individual and family stability well-being. Each nation can decide what level of financial support and what tax or wealth dividend should constitute its Basic Income policy.
On an ethical basis, Thomas Paine argued that every human being is entitled to live and subsist on the land of the Earth. This is a universal human right. However, individuals differ in their abilities and talents to create enterprises which can contribute to general prosperity and mutual aid. The ability to develop and exercise those talents derive from the society—starting with their family, through school, to whatever self-devised means of social cooperation within the law enables one to be productive and prosperous in conjunction with others.
However, the basis of wealth begins with the properties of land from which a rentier society arises as Henry George in his classic Progress and Poverty describes. In return for the individual autonomy and freedom to create, drawing on the land belonging to each and all, a rent is due society in the form of a universal guaranteed income because everyone “owns” the land. Thomas Paine wrote that when God created the Earth, he did not set up a real estate office. Thus a guaranteed annual income is a form of justice which creates a right reflecting social inclusion and human solidarity.
Basic Income provision should be considered as an extension of liberty as a matter of principle in a complex, interdependent society. This extension includes the democratization of time. Basic income provides citizens with more choice over how they spent their time over the phases of their life, and, to some degree, loosens external controls in order that individuals can form collectives which facilitate their values. It furthers what Professor Alberto Guerriero Ramos characterizes as “organizational delimitation” so that the ethos and manners of the market society do not overextend into other realms of social possibilities. Citizens can then choose between employment work, civic work, communal or volunteer work, and personal time, and be more flexible in coordinating with others in their households and communities.
Social Transformation
Social progress then correlates with the interstices of greater human freedom and their capabilities of cooperating with others. While no utopia, the basic income enables a more dynamic social structure to continually emerge.
“In envisaging a new social structure, we may think of progress chiefly as the continuous extension of avenues of opportunity for decision, experiment, and fulfillment….The egalitarian principle requires us not merely to match rewards with deserts, but also to respect the fact that every man carries an aura of uncertainty and unknown potentialities around him. Since we cannot agree on the end of human development, we have no right to exclude anyone from the opportunity to share in the process, still less from the freedom to determine his own ends and make his own decisions.” P. 304 and 305 Parapolitics. Finland is proposing an experiment in 2017.
For more current information on Basic Income, Google search “Basic Income Group” for a wide bibliography of publications and current experiments around the world.
For a remarkable chapter on the GAI and social structures of the future, see Raghavan Iyer chapter 16 “An Unfinished Dream” in Parapolitics (Oxford University Press-1979)
