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Political maneuvers and bureaucratic resistance helped sink Finland’s widely watched basic income experiment. But the most important factor behind the policy’s demise was its uneasy relationship with widespread social norms about work and fairness.
A universal basic income would shore up the market. We need ideas that shrink it.
In Canada, the results of pandemic income support seem to confirm the claims of universal basic income advocates. But to make UBI work, we need to ensure it's coupled with a massive expansion of welfare state policies.
Why Richard Nixon once advocated for basic income — and then turned against it.
In Welfare for Markets, Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora show that cash transfers emerged as an alternative to the welfare state favored by a left that had abandoned hope in socialism and a right hostile to democratic management of the economy.
The “UBI” ideas being thrown around as a response to the coronavirus are, in many cases, neither universal, basic, nor an income. But they do show how much the Left has shifted what’s considered possible over the past decade.
Politicians who represent the interests of capital clearly grasp the point that a UBI would tilt the playing field in favor of workers. That’s why they’re fighting the idea tooth and nail, even amid an unprecedented crisis.
With millions of people put out of work, analysts across the political spectrum have proclaimed that the time has come for an Unconditional Basic Income. But this safety net won’t be enough unless we take on the biggest problem we face — an economic model based on high rents and high personal debts.
Without the right design, a universal basic income would do little to advance radical change.
Universal cash assistance programs have provided an indispensable financial lifeline for households and the economy as a whole during the pandemic. But contrary to many advocates of a universal basic income, the past year's experience offers no model for a left policy agenda in normal times.
A Universal Basic Income may not be much of a utopia in itself, but it points in surprisingly radical directions.
Even if we were to free ourselves from the capitalist work ethic and provide everyone with a universal basic income, our society would still require some amount of socially necessary labor. Socialists should strive to reimagine work, not eliminate it.
Imagine a different inauguration. If we had a working-class party, what would it fight for?
The New York Times is wrong — the Finnish public hasn't turned against the jobless.
10 percent of all national income is paid out to the 1 percent as capital income. Why not give it to all as a universal basic income?
There’s no way toward a sustainable future without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs. And the way to do that is through a universal basic income.
People across the political spectrum support a universal basic income. Socialists must make the anticapitalist case for it.
The Labour Party announced today that in the next election, it will fight for Universal Basic Services, making public services free at the point of use and universally accessible. It’s a landmark in the fight to curb the influence of the market over our lives.
UBI advocates have a habit of mistaking politics for arithmetic. Proving that a policy is mathematically possible isn’t enough — and it can distract from more compelling left priorities.