AUTHOR’S NOTE: this is an early draft of a section in a book I’m working on. I’m interested in any helpful feedback.
In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his famous, “Four Freedoms Speech,” which came to be seen as America’s ambition for a post-war world. These four freedoms, he declared, should be guaranteed to everyone around the globe. His list included the familiar freedoms of religion and expression and two less-familiar concepts: the freedom from fear and the freedom from want. He defined freedom from fear as the freedom from the threat of violence and the freedom from want as a decent standard of living.[i]
A few years later, without referencing Roosevelt’s speech, the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” elaborated on what could be called the freedom from want, here conceived as a right rather than a liberty: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”[ii]
Neither Roosevelt’s speech nor the “Declaration” discussed why these freedoms are so important. I want to explain why these two liberties—most particularly the freedom from want but both in connection—should be understood as fundamental to the exercise virtually all of our other rights and freedoms. From that point, I’ll argue that UBI is the best way—in fact, the only truly effective way—to establish the freedom from want in the modern economy.
Human beings are not game pieces. We are not theoretical abstractions. We are animals. And like all animals we have needs that must be met or we will suffer greatly and die. A person who lacks secure access to the goods they need to survive or to the resources with which they could produce those goods themselves is in a state of fear, duress, and desperation.
The costs of poverty to physical and mental health and wellbeing are staggering and well-documented. But I don’t want to talk about the very poor just yet. I want to talk about how the fear that we could end up in a state of want affects all of us.
When Roosevelt talked about the freedom from fear, he focused on the fear of violence, but we should think about it more widely and in conjunction with the freedom from want. Even if you’re not in a state of want at the moment, if the threat of economic destitution hangs over your head, you’re not really free from want. The fear of it will be in your thoughts and will affect your behavior.
When our needs or the needs of our loved ones are under threat, we will be driven to do desperate things. Amartya Sen tells the story of Kader Mia, who left home during a riot when he knew people of his ethic group were being targeted. He was unfree to stay home because he needed to find work to feed his family. He was targeted and stabbed. He died in front of a very young Amartya Sen.[iii]
Most people have not faced the level of acute desperation that Kader Mia did, but economic destitution has driven people to beg, to steal, to sell themselves into slavery, to prostitute their bodies, to accept exploitation, to endure sexual harassment, to risk their lives, or to sacrifice their long-term health for a decent living in the short term. The ever-present reality that the alternative to the labor market is economic destitution regularly drives many millions or, more likely, billions of people to accept lower wages and harsher working conditions than person who was genuinely free from want would reasonably accept. Observations like these lend Jean-Jaques Rousseau to argue, “[I]t is impossible to enslave a man without first putting him in a situation where he cannot do without another man.”
Yet we live in a world where the vast majority of us spend our working lives with the fear of economic destitution constantly in the background. We pass homeless people and beggars on the streets, and we know that, if we failed to keep working, to keep money coming in, someday that would be us. Only the very wealthy, perhaps the top 1% or less, go through their entire working lives without the realistic possibility that they might end up destitute if they don’t keep working for bosses, clients, landlords, and banks.
We might not think about it very much, but most of us, especially when we’re young, are only a few paychecks away from losing our homes. And that fact affects our behavior. We stay at jobs where we’re mistreated, underappreciated, and underpaid. We leave bad jobs, only when we’re confident we can find another quickly enough or when we have another option to cushion the blow. Education and retraining to improve our lives are dependent on fundraising, years of savings, or the ability to fit it in around our jobs. We accept extended hours when we might rather stick to the 40-hour work or negotiate a 30-workweek—if negotiation were possible for ordinary employees. We accept the mandated two weeks of vacation when we might rather have four weeks or more like people do in other countries.
The fear of deprivation harms everyone who works for a living well up into the middle class. We, the 99%, accept a lot of crap that we wouldn’t accept if the fear of want wasn’t hanging over our heads. And accepting crap on the job is only way the lack of universal freedom from want negatively affects us all.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in their book, the Sprit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, present an enormous amount of evidence showing that inequality negatively affects everyone, not just the people at the bottom. It is associated with reduced life expectancy, poorer educational outcomes, higher crime, higher incidences of mental health problems, increased drug abuse, greater obesity, more unhappy children, increased bullying behavior, more social distrust, more suspicion, reduced economic growth, and greater distrust of fellow citizens.[iv] I discussed the ramifications of Wilkinson and Pickett’s findings in an earlier book:
According to Wilkinson and Pickett, the reason inequality affects everyone is that the more a society is divided into haves and have-nots, the more mental, physical, and economic capital everyone has to expend to protect or improve their position. Every child grows up with more stress and fear about their future. Everyone spends more on “positional goods” that help them move up or maintain their place in the hierarchy. These goods don’t just include showy luxuries; they also include social necessities, such as entrance into the top schools at all levels of education. In societies with low levels of inequality and in which good quality education is available to all, parents don’t stress over getting their children into an elite elementary school.
Of course, people at the top do get some benefits from living in a highly inequal society, but at some point, the additional benefits come down to easier-and-easier access to more-and-more luxuries, no amount of which can make up for the physical and psychic cost of living in a fearful and antagonistic society.[v]
In this way, the negative effects of economic deprivation reach even the most privileged of us. But it harms some of us a lot more than others. As I discussed in my earlier book:
According to the Poor People’s Campaign, 250,000 Americans die of complications of poverty and inequality every year. Child poverty alone costs the United States more than $1 trillion per year in lost economic productivity, health, increased crime and incarceration. Hunger costs $178.8 billion per year in health care expenses and educational outcomes. These figures ignore nonmonetary human costs. How much money is the death of a human being worth? What is the monetary value of building a society in which no child is forced by financial necessity to experience periods of hunger, malnutrition, and homelessness?
The Poor People’s Campaign also provides evidence of how hunger, food insecurity, homelessness, and housing insecurity scar children in ways that are costly to them and to society as a whole throughout their future lives. Children who grow up in poverty complete two fewer years of schooling than average for all children; they work less; and they end up in worse health throughout their lives. Children and teenagers who experience poverty and homelessness are more vulnerable to physical maltreatment and sexual exploitation. Infant and childhood mortality are closely correlated to poverty.[vi]
We would all benefit if we free ourself from the fear of economic depression, and we can do it, as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1968, “I am now convinced that the simplest solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a new widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”[vii] (“Guaranteed income” is a close cousin of UBI.[viii])
For our purpose, the most important aspect of King’s words is the recognition that poverty is something that can be directly abolished. Poverty might seem like an intractable economic problem that many societies have tried over-and-over again to eliminate without success, but when you understand what poverty is, you can understand it in the way Nelson Mandela described, “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is manmade, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”[ix] But as I will argue only a universal and unconditional program, like UBI, can do so.
Poverty is the lack of the legal right to access the resources you need to survive and to live a decent life. It is not misuse of the money you have. People with money can live squalor, but they cannot live in poverty. Subsistence farmers, fishers, hunters and gatherers might not live well, but they do not experience the poverty propertyless people experience in a market economy. They do not experience what homeless people in the United States experience, when although they are perfectly capable of erecting a shelter, they have no place they can legally do it. They do not experience what people experienced during the Bengal famine when people starved to death in front of cake and pastry shops because they did not have money to buy food.[x]
That poverty is a monetary phenomenon can be seen in the fact that every major famine in the last two centuries was caused not by a lack of food, but by a collapse of entitlements. Transportation lines that could be used to relieve food shortages have been used instead to move food out of famine areas because, when starving people have no money to buy food, the market sends food elsewhere.[xi] The cause of the Irish potato famine was not that people couldn’t eat potatoes, but that they had no potatoes to sell and no one wanted to buy their labor.
These examples illustrate not only poverty but also market dependence. For most people in the world, the only means of survival is to buy goods in the market. Today, most of us have grown up dependent on the market. It seems so natural that our language doesn’t have a widely recognized term for it. But it is highly unnatural.
In fact, market dependence is a very recent phenomenon created by the movement of peasants off the land during the colonial period. In early American history, most Americans were farmers who were capable of growing nearly everything they needed themselves. Before the arrival of White people in North America, few if any people north of the Rio Grande lacked the freedom from want. Few of them had any realistic fear that they would ever be unable to meet their basic needs for more than a day or two.[xii]
No one disputes that the market has great advantages, but we could have established a market economy without taking away everyone’s freedom from want and the fear of it. We could reestablish the freedom from want by introducing a UBI high enough to live on.
Despite what market propagandists say about low-income people “lacking opportunity” rather than “freedom,” the freedom from want is freedom. We are market dependent because aggressive governments seized land mostly from people who treated it as an equal-access commons and then made laws privatizing the Earth and its resources without making provisions to ensure access to the resources necessary to secure the freedom from want for everyone. If you have no money, wherever you go, someone will interfere with any attempt you make to use the Earth and its resources to meet your own needs. That is profound unfreedom in the most negative sense of the term.
For those of us in the 99%, dependence on the market in general implies dependence on the labor market in particular. And labor market dependence implies that the freedom from want is never fully secure. The default position in our economy is homelessness. When you come of age, if you fail to work, fail to qualify for any government program, and fail to receive sufficient gifts of wealth from your family or anyone else, you will be destitute. Throughout your working life, as long as you fail to become independently wealthy, you will eventually return to that default if you, for whatever reason, stop working, fail to qualify for a sufficient government program, and fail to receive gifts.
You might enter the labor market because you have great opportunities, but whether your opportunities are great or terrible, you will enter the labor market because the default position for someone who refuses is begging, eating out of dumpsters, and sleeping on the sidewalk. We do not need to be that cruel. A system where the fear of want cruelly hangs over the heads of the 99% as they enter and spend their lives in the labor market is a cruel system with no claim to call itself “free trade.”
Labor market dependence neither follows from nor promotes freedom as we can see clearly from the discussion above. Yet, it is fact of life for most Americans for most of their lives.
I don’t know how to eliminate market dependence in a world of 8 billion people, but I do know how to eliminate labor market dependence and the poverty and fear of economic destitution that are inherent to it. Introduce UBI: put a floor under everyone’s income large enough to meet their basic needs.
If you’re serious about eliminating poverty and economic destitution, “abolish it directly” as Martin Luther King advised. More and more, progressives are coming to the realization that UBI is what we need to fight for. It’s no panacea, but it makes most of our other social and economic problems easier to solve. It makes things enormously better for the people who need it most, and helps people right up the scale.
– Karl Widerquist, Al Najada Hotel Apartments, January 24, 2025
[i] Roosevelt, “President Franklin Roosevelt’s Annual Message (Four Freedoms) to Congress (1941).”
[ii] United-Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
[iii] Sen, Development as Freedom.
[iv] Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
[v] Widerquist, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge.
[vi] Widerquist.
[vii] King, Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community?
[viii] For the technical differences see Widerquist, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge.
[ix] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/03/hearafrica05.development
[x] Sen, Development as Freedom.
[xi] Sen.
[xii] Widerquist and McCall, The Prehistory of Private Property: Implications for Modern Political Theory; Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy.