Justice and feasibility

Analysis of basic income – a cash grant paid individually, monthly, unconditionally and universally in a population, and permanently – has been shaped by concerns about the grounds for and the implementation of the scheme that inevitably come up against each other in practical terms. This paper accordingly first examines the present constrained context, then champions a developmental justice case for basic income against distributive alternatives, and finally highlights risks in implementation debates linked with bending to prevailing welfare norms and crises.

However, while The Economist got it right when arguing that public ‘customers’ get less for more cost, and that in Britain, following austerity, “[o]nce-generous legal aid became miserly; in-work benefits fell; [and the] police solved fewer crimes”, rather than emphasising distributive and tax trade-offs between generations (see the ‘Feasibility’ section below), I will argue that deeper issues are at stake, linked with choice of development governance based on following the market.3 ‘Shrinkflation’ – paying (and, we might add, working) more for less – has become embedded in the workings of contemporary private and public economies. Meanwhile, global corporates hiking up inflation on the back of war and global shortages are listing huge windfalls.4 The government response in the form of windfall taxes has been too accommodating (in the UK, 90 per cent are effectively returned via subsidies), and neither this measure nor government schemes for households have been made permanent.5 The problem of establishing grounds and measures for government to subsidise household budgets encapsulates a dissonance between ideal and reality that pertains to the case for basic income as well. We need not only a new social contract, but also a new social construct, in which concerns of justice inform the design of institutions and the economy follows.

When questions about the justification for and feasibility of basic income are set together, this can generate productive insights about wider reasons and conditions for basic income, which test more theoretical arguments. In this paper, rather than looking at principled arguments in terms of fairer distribution, I focus on the institutional and democratic innovation within the political economy that a basic income can contribute by inculcating the idea and form of developmental justice.

The modern classical defence of basic income by Philippe Van Parijs focusses on the scope for free lifestyle choices involving personally set trade-offs between employment, care and leisure in a globalised economy, in which basic income as a form of distributive justice secures freedom.6 While debates have begun to shift towards anti-poverty, health, personal development, and choice of work, the notion that – with basic income – individuals can attain control over their lives and wellbeing remains quite influential.7 However, looking at freedom or wellbeing in terms of individual time-profile and activity choices may be too transactional – and the more we take this approach, the more dominant the market already governing our lives becomes.

The right to retire goes beyond our current idea of retirement and is defined as living well at any age and having the right to control our tempo – our own and in fellowship with others. This right holds out the hope for a more stable public services sector and is something that labour unions have fought for since their inception. Experimental studies also suggest that this form of control allows more deep thought, enhancing human motivation and function.10 The ability to attain or change stable occupations and control of time accords with post-war British-drawn ideas of equality that were never really implemented, linked with T. H. Marshall's notion of citizenship in terms of quality services and quality lifestyles, for all to be able “to live like gentlemen”.11 At stake today is not just working hours but also workload, and standing up to the eroding forces of interpersonal competition.

Basic income is in principle an institution to protect against structural injustice in this form. It is not enough (I believe) to create what structural justice demands. However, by taking people partially out of structural injustice basic income – properly understood as a stable institution among others - sends a signal of desert to structural justice, and leads us on a path to define what this is and requires within other institutions besides. ‘Living like gentlemen’ was complemented in Marshall with the idea of occupational ‘second chances’. He of course had in mind a later escape from the early damning effect of the tiered education system in Britain. The concept is broader. Real occupational chances (and second chances) must be part of what structural justice requires: that human beings cannot be displaced from their homes or from occupying productive life journeys of their choosing within a better organised economy.

In this sense the idea of basic income as a stable institution is part of envisioning structural justice, but not itself the whole path. The idea of basic income as part of envisioning a stable state of human development allows us to look from the individual perspective upwards to what structural justice entails.

There are many other examples of how institutions currently spend money inefficiently.15 The impact of precarious contracting on public costs can be illustrated in the care sector, which has been beset by chronic staff shortages, which in turn drive up public health costs.16 Weak regulation is also costly. A case in point is the very significant role and expansion of housing subsidies in Britain during the period after housing policy liberalisation of the 1980s.17 The contemporary structural injustice of the benefit system extends to those working and earning now. The case when people have to spend hard-earned savings to cover their needs until they are completely broke before they can access income support (and the threat of sanctions) is an offence to developmental justice too.18 At stake in basic income is the right not to be punished twice, by misfortune, and for misfortune, which turns temporary bad luck into a permanent state.

As argued above, the right defence of basic income is not that it redistributes to people in poverty, but that it restores the basic independence of citizens and abates the current structural forces of developmental injustice. Recent experiments in partial versions of basic income worldwide and other research on sources of economic security have shown beyond doubt the motivating effect of economic stability.19 However, the motivating effect of basic security was never really in doubt, surely: how could it be, against the accepted argument that entrepreneurship benefits from limited liability and stable taxes? The debate needs to move on to consider precisely the relationship between political economy, shared funding, and rights.

In the same context, a risk with romanticising basic income purely as an anti-poverty tool (let alone a sufficient one – again) is that it could become an easy solution for international development funders advocating intensified global integration. To some extent this has materialised, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently proposed to cut back the Indian state through a simplified welfare system, while arguing that sanctions on unemployed people should remain in place in rich countries that have the administrative capacity to police people in poverty.25

According to Martin Wolf, in a recent case for land tax, landowners big or small have done little or nothing to produce the value of their land, as a justification for taxing it.28 Yet, can we say equally of all landowners that they do not deserve their land (or building)?29 On the other hand, Wolf also makes a case for taxing land because it is easier to do (than taxing movable capital).