The Case Against a Basic Income
Article is calling for guaranteed work....
Excerpt
No existing economy can pay for a generous basic income without defunding everything else. We would either have to settle for the minimalist version — whose effects would be highly suspect — or we’d have to eliminate all other social expenditures, in effect creating Milton Friedman’s paradise. Faced with these facts, we should question UBI’s rationality; as Luke Martinelli
put it: “an affordable UBI is inadequate, and an adequate UBI is unaffordable.”
Until we profoundly transform our economies, we can’t implement a measure that would cost more than 35 percent of GDP in economies where the state already spends around 50 percent of GDP. The power relations needed to establish this level of UBI would constitute an exit from capitalism, pure and simple, rendering depictions of UBI as a “means” of social transformation nonsense. Indeed, many defenses of basic income can be classified as what
Raymond Geuss called “nonrealist political philosophy”: ideas formulated in complete abstraction from the existing world and real people, completely “disjoined from real politics” — like to the Rawlsian model of justice that serves as an important inspiration to figures like Philippe Van Parijs.
If UBI does take shape, current power relations will favor those who have economic power and want to profit by weakening the existing system of social protection and labor market regulations. Who will decide the monthly amount and who will dictate its terms and condition? Who do today’s power relations favor? Certainly not the worker.
UBI would
create a society in which “those who work too much … work less, in order to avoid burnout, breathe a little, retrain for new work, or care for their loved ones, and the jobs thus freed up could then be taken by others.” That is, it doesn’t aim at “working less, so all can work,” as the workers’ movement traditionally did, but letting everyone choose how much to work at any given moment. Proponents present it as a way to achieve a more harmonious distribution of work. That objective may seem sensible, but it raises several questions. Most important, it risks amplifying employers’ current race to the bottom.
Today’s labor market is highly stratified: some people enjoy access to
good jobs while others, subject to harsh competition, can only find precarious and unstable work.
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