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Basic income, liberal neutrality, socialism, and work

2005; Routledge; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00346760500364775

1470-1162

Michael W. Howard,

Social Policy and Reform Studies

Abstract Liberal critics often object to basic income (BI) on the grounds that it violates reciprocity and is biased toward those who choose voluntarily to opt out of work and thus violate the principle of liberal neutrality toward conceptions of the good life. In the first part of this paper I argue that liberal neutrality favors BI. Marxist critics of BI are less likely to accept liberal neutrality, but I argue in the second part that the argument for BI in the first part applies with equal force to Marxist objections that BI is unfairly exploitative of workers. Marxists are also less likely to accept current labor market trends, seeing socialism as affording more opportunity for guaranteeing everyone a right to decent work, and suspecting BI of making the unfair inequalities of capitalism a little more palatable while diverting attention from a more equitable socialist alternative. I argue that BI is not incompatible with socialism or Marxism, and should not be opposed to but rather combined with strategies for full employment. Keywords: basic incomeliberalismMarxismsocialismworkreciprocityexploitation Notes 1 An earlier version of this paper appears as "Liberal and Marxist Arguments for Basic Income," in Guy Standing (forthcoming). I am grateful to David Schweickart for presenting a series of objections to basic income that inspired the second part of this paper; these objections are explicitly addressed in the first part of the book chapter. For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I thank Steve Pressman and two anonymous reviewers, participants in the USBIG Conference, New York City, March 2002, the BIEN Congress, Geneva, Switzerland, September 2002, the Radical Philosophy Association Conference, Providence, Rhode Island, November 2002, and the University of Maine Philosophy Department Colloquium, February 2002. 2 For an argument that such neutrality leaves the theory indeterminate with respect to some central questions of distributive justice, see Howard (Citation1984a). 3 See Van Parijs 1990: 106. At the high end, Robert Schutz (Citation1996: 14 – 15) optimistically estimates that each adult could receive $30,000 of unearned income. Schutz does not explore possible disincentives to work or misallocations of labor that might diminish over time the total available for distribution, other than to point out that people work for many reasons besides money and that automation can replace the more expensive and undesirable jobs. 4 Objections to a participation income, as attractive as it might seem in principle, are of a more pragmatic character. See below. 5 I am not sure which traditions they speak for, but there are many distinguished thinkers who have endorsed a right to unconditional income, including Bertrand Russell (Citation1935), Paul LaFargue (Citation1986), and Nobel economists James Tobin (Tobin et al. Citation1967; Tobin Citation1998), Herbert Simon (Citation2001), and James Meade (Citation1989). Thus it seems hazardous to maintain that anyone who thinks this way adheres to a conception of the good life that is beyond the pale of liberalism. 7 Philippe Van Parijs, correspondence quoted in Torisky (Citation1993: 296). 6 This is not an argument for the capitalist's contribution. On the contrary, often the contribution of capital involves no contribution of the capitalist. From the standpoint of justice all such assets are collective property. Even when these assets are institutionalized in the form of private property, cooperative property, or state property, we must not lose sight of the requirement of justice to equalize the opportunities associated with control over such assets. 8 See van der Veen and Van Parijs (Citation1986) for an argument for BI as a step toward this "communist" principle of justice. 9 I owe this objection and many of the other objections addressed in this section to David Schweickart's comments (Schweickart Citation2000) on my book (Howard Citation2000). In this book I defend a form of worker-managed market socialism, together with a basic income. 10 Barry (Citation1996) makes a pragmatic case for basic income. 11 The jobs people price themselves into at the lower end of the job market will be part-time, temporary, and more lowly paid. On the one hand, some see this as a desirable situation both for employers who seek more flexible labor markets, and for those employees who seek a more flexible work schedule to accommodate family and other priorities. On the other hand, critics see BI as here facilitating the erosion of good jobs—jobs that are well-paying, permanent, and full time, and the entrenchment of two-tiered labor markets. However, BI is compatible with a policy of promoting full employment of the more robust sort, aiming at full-time, regular employment for all who seek it. The worker's right to refuse undesirable forms of employment, which BI strengthens more the higher its level, should lead many employers to offer more "good" jobs in order to attract workers. The issues raised here underscore that BI needs to be part of a package of measures that includes labor market policy. 12 Roemer estimates the annual dividend on non-financial, non-farm corporate and non-corporate wealth per adult in the 1980s to be about $1,200, if these assets were to be nationalized and distributed equally (1994: 133 – 143). A real world example of a citizen's dividend is the Alaska Permanent Fund, which grants to every resident of Alaska an unconditional income based on investments from the Alaskan oil revenues. Current information on the Alaska Permanent Fund can be found at the following web site: www.apfc.org/ The dividend in 2002 was $1,540.76 per resident. 13 For a higher estimate, based on Clark's data, see Harvey (Citation2003). 14 For the bottom quintile, the average household income would increase by $9,613, for the second, by $7,250, and for the third, by $4,262 (Clark Citation2003: 150 – 152). For analysis of who would benefit from a more modest, tax neutral BI for the United Kingdom, see Atkinson (Citation1996). 15 This is not to imply that these wages were determined by the needs of workers' families, rather than the bargaining power of the workers. The decline in such bargaining power has forced both members of two-adult households into the labor market. 16 One such critic of the right to work is Standing (Citation2002), cited in Harvey (Citation2003). 17 For these and other important points in support of a right to work, see Harvey (Citation2003).