"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death." (from "Auntie Mame")
Auntie Mame was speaking metaphorically, of course, but George Scialabba (at Commonweal) takes the conceit more literally in defending the idea of a Universal Basic Income. Scialabba begins his article "The Free Banquet" by acknowledging how ingrained the work ethic and the idea of having to earn one's daily bread are in Western culture:
From St. Paul’s venerable saying, “if a man does not work, neither shall he eat,” to the always-contemporary saw, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” the common sense of humankind has always seemed dead against a universal, unconditional basic income.
Not that Western societies have been invariably hard-hearted; as Scialabba notes, charity and care for the poor are also part of our patrimony. But such charity, even reconceived as an "entitlement," has its downsides:
Aid for the deserving poor has at times, and especially in modern times, entailed the expensive and humiliating burden of proving to the satisfaction of donors that the recipient is indeed both deserving and poor. And even in the most generous and enlightened societies, such aid has sometimes had perverse effects. The most common is the “poverty trap.” When aid is means-tested, every dollar of earned income above the qualifying level results in a corresponding reduction of aid. This is a disincentive to accept the generally low-income, training-poor jobs available to welfare recipients. The same disincentive functions as a “household trap,” keeping women—the usual caregivers—with small children at home until the children are grown, insuring that when those women do eventually enter the labor market, they are at a severe disadvantage.
Though it may come as a surprise to conservatives, "We do not, obviously, take very good care of our poor and unemployed," writes Scialabba. Moreover, "we will soon have even more of them: the elimination of jobs by automation has barely begun. Without a radical new approach to economic security, we are headed either for an even worse bureaucratic morass or for a Blade Runner, devil-take-the-hindmost world."
Which brings us to the Universal Basic Income, an idea recently dismissed by Damon Linker as leading inevitably to psychological and spiritual degradation. Scialabba sees it differently, as do the authors of the new book BASIC INCOME which serves as the basis for Scialabba's essay. It turns out that a guaranteed subsistence is by no means a novel idea:
Like most good political ideas, the right to a basic income originated in the Enlightenment, though proposals for the relief of the poor are of course much older. St. Ambrose waxed eloquently indignant on the subject of economic inequality. Luther admonished the German nobility that “it would be easy to make a law, if only we had the courage…that every city should provide for its own poor.” The narrator of More’s Utopia railed against England’s savage punishment of crimes against property: “It would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that no one is under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief, then a corpse.”
The philosophes radicalized and universalized this impulse. According to Montesquieu, the state “owes all its citizens a secure subsistence”; Rousseau posited that “every man has naturally a right to everything he needs”; Condorcet wrote that “society is obliged to secure the subsistence of all its citizens.” Thomas Paine even proposed the first universal basic income, combining an endowment at age twenty-one and a retirement income at fifty.
Scialabba spends a good deal of his piece examining the various options for implementing a UBI. More to the point, perhaps, he emphasizes that "basic income is not a poverty-reduction program; it is a freedom-maximization program. Its purpose is to increase options for everyone, in both work life and intimate life. With a secure basic income...recipients are freer to take a low-paying job that provides valuable training or experience, hence perhaps a way out of the low-wage ghetto. They are also freer to create their own jobs, and even to become entrepreneurs, on however humble a scale...A basic income aims at allowing people to design their lives, on the principle that while creativity in some form is a universal biological endowment, chronically insecure, degraded, and exploited people cannot be creative, and society will be worse off for the loss."
This vision, of course, is precisely what Damon Linker (among others) has dismissed on the grounds that only a very few people are capable of living properly enlightened, creative, and self-directed lives; most people freed from work, Linker believes, will slide into lives of apathy, self-indulgence, and useless entertainments, all of which will "degrade" them spiritually and psychologically. This argument might be stronger if not for the fact that our current system (consumer capitalism and competitive individualism) degrades plenty of people already and leads them to the same dire fates about which Linker warns; as it is, Linker can only extol "backbreaking labor" and "mind-numbing tedium" as acceptable costs of the "dignity of work".
George Scialabba, on the other hand, thinks it's high time we made the effort to realize "a generous social vision that is at least as old as Saint Ambrose and as up-to-date as Pope Francis. Our sensible and humane descendants—they are bound to be sensible and humane, since humanity would otherwise have long since succumbed to nuclear or environmental catastrophe—will doubtless wonder, with the easy impatience of posterity, what we were waiting for."
Our current economic structure offers both the scandal of wide disparities in wealth between rich and poor and the attendant burdens and insecurities of everyone caught in the middle. As Scialabba notes, "It is...never too soon to disturb the ineffable confidence of overpaid blockheads in their perfect entitlement to a disproportionate share of the common wealth. There most certainly is such a thing as a free lunch. There is, in fact, a free banquet, of which every rich person daily partakes. It is long past time they invited the rest of us."
If your thinking is influenced by Christianity, you might call Scialabba's approach "an economics of the Kingdom"; if your thinking is more secular, you might simply call it "prosperity and security for all". Call it what you will: a Universal Basic Income is both desirable and achievable, and it should be part of any progressive political platform going forward.
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