Universal Basic Income and a post-liberal, post-global economy
An essay from April 2020
2024 Editorial Note:
If it secured a minimal safety net and got rid of the welfare poverty trap with zero impact on incentives, a partial basic income could provide a way to reconcile the social cohesion of the post-war Keynesian welfare state and the working class populist MAGA constituency, with a more centralized, livelihood economy in which people are forced to be more proactive and self-sufficient - a sort of libertarian agenda for families and communities rather than individuals. This is very different to the UBI proposals floated by globalists from the World Economic Forum - since it is predicated on a radical withdrawal and simplification of the state and an equally radical extension of subsidiarity. It’s Rerum Novarum for the 21st century. By far the best manifesto for a future in which families are allowed to mobilize their domestic means of production is Kevin Carson’s Home Brew Industrial Revolution. I didn’t express this aspect very well in this essay. It is what it is.
Hot on the heels of news of the basic income experiment in Spain, apparently the Pope is now on board. This should be no surprise. Basic income has a Christian pedigree going back through Quakers like Denis Milner after the First World War, through William Ogilvie to Thomas Spence and Tom Paine in Agrarian Justice . It also has close affinities with land tax/social divides schemes of the sort advocated by Henry George in his ‘Single Tax’. The ethical justifications usually run something along the lines of: God made the Earth for everyone; the market economy may be efficient and fair but entrepreneurs garner a benefit from land monopoly that rightfully belongs to the whole community; conceived as a social dividend, a basic income simply pays out the dividend due to each human being qua membership of humanity and common inheritance of God’s creation.
The details don’t really matter at this stage. In pragmatic terms, a BI could secure the very basic welfare safety net that history shows is necessary, at the very least for, for political stability , if not as a social-ethical obligation. It is vanishingly cheap to administer – coming out of direct taxation and paid directly into personal bank accounts, qua citizenship. This would save tens of billions in that there is no means test to be policed by an army of form filling bureaucrats. It is fair, in that everyone gets it. For the rich, the same (and more) leaves their account in the other direction in the form of income and other taxes. For the less well off, the BI provides hassle free security during periods of illness, unemployment, re-training, or family crisis – and most important of all, it doesn’t undermine incentives for either voluntary work or paid employment or entrepreneurship. There is no poverty trap; and whatever you might think, no licence for idlers - because a UBI would be much less generous than current welfare provisions; but less bureaucratic, paid through out life and incentivizing of individual/household planning, training, self-improvement and work.
On the other hand, social democrats this is a real downside. A basic income could only ever represent a partial income, insufficient to cover all living costs for most individuals. Those who see basic income as the welfare state by other means, will always be disappointed. Without a suite of supplementary means tested benefits (e.g. housing benefit), a basic income regime would necessarily require the re-expansion of intergenerational family, community and charitable giving to take up the slack; as well as a new culture of more self-sufficient homesteading - self-building, self-growing, self-sustaining.
In terms of the political economy advanced in this blog, such a partial BI proves the most suitable way to facilitate the re- expansion of the domain of livelihood – informal economy, community care, the commons, barn-raising as a community/societal habit, domestic and community production, sufficiency.
With regard to the wider global economy, the current pandemic is underlining the ecological and security craziness of over dependence on China and the global economy. Steve Bannon and the national conservative right are quite correct to advocate for an end to extreme-globalization, for ‘bringing the supply chain home’, and renationalizing, re-localizing production within the framework of a less-profit-centred, more family/community friendly and embedded form of capitalism (see Tucker Carlson below). Left-Libertarians such as Kevin Carson are right to point to the way that neo-liberal economics and bureaucratic state socialism have combined to deprive people of the means of production that is sitting right in front of them – their barn, garage, kitchen table, friend/neighbour network. Modern technology – 3d printing and the like- is rapidly undermining the economies of scale that drove manufacturing off shore. It is now possible to imagine a political economy of small scale, high-tech, sometimes informal production based in families and communities. Kropotkin, Gandhi, Tolstoy ,Schumacher and countless others, dreamed of such face-to-face, human scale production system. But hitherto, it has always seemed to require privation and the donning of a hair shirt. We could have industrial abundance or pre-modern social capital but not both. This is no longer true. It is possible to begin to imagine an economy that is technically sophisticated, multi-scaled, innovative and progressive, but less dependent on mass consumerism, less dependent on every increasing thoughputs of materials and energy, and less destructive of social and spiritual capital (sorry for that last one – I can’t think of a better term right now).
If we do move in this direction, one thing is clear. Both the State and the Market would get smaller and the domain of Livelihood would expand. What does this mean? It means that all those institutional innovations of the welfare state that the left has come to rely on, would become smaller also. Less tax from a smaller formal economy funding a less expansive welfare state. Caring would have to rely to a greater extent on face-to-face relations of reciprocation in communities, marriage, kinship and extended family. There is enormous room for innovation of new social forms based on this premise – some illustrated in these posts on this blog:
One vote one club: communitarian demos proposal bas on Txoko Basque Cooking Clubs and social capital
But the obsession with state-funded identity politics, the crazy extremes of self-identification, the assumption that the state should displace family at every level (e.g. the massive expansion of childcare etc) – non of this will last anyway in an era of limits, and it is all incompatible with the vision advanced here. On the other hand, a stripped down welfare system linked not to neo-liberal austerity but to a post-liberal communitarian society, that celebrates and rediscovers forms of enchantment with both social and natural worlds (pagan, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu) but also the very specifically Christian bedrock of all our assumptions about the sanctity of individual human life, marriage, human rights, the division between secular and religious spheres, the separation of Church and State (if you have doubts see Holland 2019 for the best book of the last ten years) — this could be facilitated to an enormous degree by a basic income scheme. In particular, a UBI could be linked to civic participation (Atkinson’s 1985/2016 Participation Income, to life long national and local service. In this way the welfare system would not undermine the commons represented by shared rituals and patterns of ‘barn raising’ reciprocation, but would revive and expand such forms. I detailed this schematically here:
So there really is enormous potential here for a post-liberal, post-left-versus-right, post-global economic system: nationally based; localist; libertarian for households; regulatory vis-a-vis corporations; communitarian vis-a-vis solidarity and regulation between households and within communities; green through the re-emphasis on meaning and reciprocity; conservative through the re-emphasis on meaning, family-life and social obligation; socialist in providing a safety net and reversing the corrosive and empty exposure to global markets.
It won’t happen unless conservatives get on board. This is one possible vehicle/strategy for this to happen This won’t happen unless people on the left and greens allow conservatives to get on board. And this won’t happen if woke-politics dominates.
Some references:
START HERE
Kevin Carson’s Home Brew Industrial Revolution
Everything you need to know about Basic Income including articles from yours truly back in the 1990s - CIRG
Tucker Carlson on the big business war on family
Philippe van Parijs’s libertarian proposal for a Basic Income
AND SOME OF MY/OUR ACADEMIC PIECES ON POST-GROWTH POLITICAL ECONOMY
Zywert, K & Quilley, S (2017) Health systems in an era of biophysical limits: the wicked dilemmas of modernity. Social Theory & Health. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41285-017-0051-4.
Quilley, S and Zywert, K. (2019) ‘Livelihood, market and state: What does a political economy predicated on the ‘individual-in-group-in-place’ actually look like?’ in the 30th anniversary issue of Ecological Economics on the future of the discipline Ed. Kish, K. and Farley, J.
Quilley, S (2019) ‘Liberty in the Near Anthropocene: State, Market and Livelihood. What the changing I/We balance means for feminism, nationalism, liberalism, socialism and conservatism’ in in Liberty and the Ecological Crisis Freedom on a Finite Planet, 1st EditionEdited by Christopher J. Orr, Kaitlin
Kish, Bruce Jennings (London Routledge)
Quilley, S (2019) ‘Liberty in the (Long) Anthropocene: The ‘I’ and the ‘We’ in the Longue Duree ‘ in Liberty and the Ecological Crisis Freedom on a Finite Planet, 1st Edition Edited by Christopher J. Orr, Kaitlin Kish, Bruce Jennings (London Routledge)
Kish, K. and Quilley, S. (2019). ‘Livelihood and the Individual: New Ecological Economic Development Goals’. In: BSIA-10: Reflections on the Sustainable Development Goals. By: Dalby, S. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, ON.
Kish, K. and Quilley, S. (2019). Labour and Regenerative Production. In: A Research Agenda for Ecological Economics. By: Costanza, B., Farley, J., and Kubiszewski, I. Edward Elgar: New York, NY.
Quilley, S (2017) “Navigating the Anthropocene: Environmental politics and complexity in an era of limits.” PP 439-470 In Handbook on Growth and Sustainability Edited by Peter A. Victor, Brett Dolter. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Quilley. S. (2018). ‘Individual or Community as a Frame of Reference for Health in Modernity and in the Anthropocene’ In Health in the Anthropocene: Living well on a finite planet. By Quilley, S. and Zywert, K. (eds) Toronto University Press (Accepted)