Janus debate preview contents:
- The Freedom From Want and Basic Income
- Basic Income as Power to the People
- Basic Income and the Voluntary-Participation ideal
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a major change in approach. The lynchpin of the contemporary public policy system is judgmentalism. Our policies seldom help people unconditionally. We say to people in need, first you got to prove you’re truly needy and truly deserving. And of course, our main criteria for disadvantaged people to qualify as “deserving” is to prove they’re willing (if able) to work for and take orders from more privileged people. That is, current policies are meant to establish a mandatory-participation economy for able-bodied, working-age people.
A livable UBI would necessarily establish a voluntary-participation economy for all. With UBI in place, we don’t use necessities as an incentive to get the have-nots to serve the haves. We use luxuries as incentives. Mandatory participation is very popular. It’s probably the source of most opposition to UBI. Some people, even many progressives, will say that they want to eliminate poverty but only with conditions.
The eliminate-poverty-but position is a delusion. If the goal is to abolish or eliminate poverty, there has to be at least one program that is universal, unconditional, and large enough to live on (i.e. something very much like a livable UBI). The only reason for conditions is to leave out people who fail to meet them. Unless the conditions are so easy that no one could fail to fulfill them, the program is incapable of eliminating poverty. In other words, either the conditions are phony, or the goal of eliminating poverty is phony.
Furthermore, conditional policies rely on maintaining the fear of want. Without the fear of economic destitution (or some other penalty), there is no incentive to keep meeting the conditions. In a mandatory-participation economy, common people accept the terms of participation, its unequal rewards, and hierarchical governance (both public and private), not because they personally believe it’s worth it, but because they would be homeless if they refuse. We have failed to eliminate poverty as long as it remains a credible threat hanging over the heads of the mass of people. Can we claim to be a humane nation if fear of economic destitution is our method to get the mass of our fellow citizens to do what their told by the bosses and owners of the world?
Right-wing people have little trouble with questions like this. They are happy to otherize the disadvantaged, to declare that many fellow citizens are bad people who deserve homelessness for their indolence until they learn to accept the lowest wages worst and working conditions the economy has to offer.[i]
Progressives who support mandatory participation usually have more difficulty with questions like this. They think of themselves as people who want to empower the disadvantaged, and so they have a hard time explaining why they oppose the real, substantive power voluntary participation would give to every individual. It’s hard to pin down their answers to questions like whether they want the credible threat of homelessness to continually hang over the heads of the working and middle classes; what exactly happens to people who fail to meet the conditions; will there always be a few homeless people to remind the rest of us that participation is really mandatory?
Affirmative answers to these questions would bring in a conservative element into an otherwise progressive agenda. But rejecting them would be to endorse something very much like UBI.
Progressive UBI opponents usually avoid these issues by focusing on other aspects of the choice between voluntary- and mandatory-participation approaches, but when pressed, they have little choice but to fall back on the conservative premise that people who refuse job offers deserve homelessness.[ii]
Ways to avoid the issue include stressing other factors, such as cost. Most cost-based criticism of UBI relies on a fallacy of focusing on the irrelevant figure of its gross cost, which as the introduction explains, greatly exaggerates the real cost of UBI. Stanczyk and his coauthor Alex Gourevitch make this mistake in their article “the Basic Income Illusion.” Using gross-cost figures, they claim that a poverty-line UBI would cost 26% of GDP. They show some limited understanding of the concept of net cost later in the paper without recognizing that it makes their earlier figure irrelevant. Even then, they greatly overestimate the cost. Without looking at data, they suggest that the net cost of poverty-level UBI would be 10-13% of GDP.[iii] My estimates based on 2015 Census Bureau data show that a poverty-line UBI would cost only about 3% of GDP.[iv]
Another way to avoid the issue is to stress other things the government could spend money on. These include education, health, transportation, and so on. These things are complements to, not substitutes for, UBI. Inequality has increased so much in the last half century that there is room to do both, and nothing else the government could do with increased spending is more important than establishing the freedom from want for everyone. Gourevitch and Stanczyk specifically stress the alternative of democratizing the workplace by strengthening unions. I’ve argued above that UBI will greatly strengthen the power of workers to unionize and strike.
Another way to avoid the issue is to argue indirectly against UBI by stressing political barriers to its adoption. The most common way to do so is to stress the popularity of “the work ethic” under the guise that everyone has to work for what they get. Gourevitch and Stanczyk do not take this strategy, but many other anti-UBI progressives do. Under this strategy, progressives acquiesce to policies forcing low-income people to conform to the “work ethic” to prove they’re “deserving.” Then, supposedly, most voters will feel sympathy for disadvantaged people. Generous redistributive programs to support good wages for workers and good benefit for those who prove they cannot work will become popular and politically stable.
Relatively progressive people have tried this strategy again-and-again since the Elizabethan Poor Laws. It seldom works for long if at all. We waste a lot of money making the poor jump through hoops to prove their merit. Lots of people who would meet almost anyone’s concept of deserving fall through the cracks. And instead of creating stable support, it creates the opportunity for conservatives to relabel almost anyone who qualifies for aid as undeserving. For example, “widows and orphans,” the most “deserving” people of the 1930s, were relabeled “welfare queens,” the least “deserving” people of the 1980s. Currently, Congress is considering taking away Medicaid benefits from people who don’t work—even if they’re too sick to work.
It is far better to attack the hypocrisy of America’s so-called work ethic. We have at best a money-making ethic. We have the worst of both worlds: a mandatory-participation economy for the bottom 95-99% and a voluntary-participation economy for the top 1-5%. Unearned income is extremely popular for the rich and for their children. Popular discourse never suggests prohibiting trust funds because the “work ethic” means that everyone has to work for what they get. It’s only other people’s children to whom that supposed “ethic” applies. And what do low-income people have to do to prove their deserving? Accept jobs taking orders, directly or indirectly, from people who are themselves exempt from this “work ethic.”
To make progress toward distributive justice, we need to make that hypocrisy unacceptable. The fight isn’t easy, but it is worthy.
Gourevitch and Stanczyk make a very different argument about political barriers. They argue that UBI is too good as a tool to fight the injustices of the class-based society. It would be so effective in breaking the power of monied interests that those interests will use their political power to defeat any UBI proposal. Instead, they argue a more realistic political strategy is to promote union building to break the control wealthy people have over the political process.[v]
If success requires the UBI movement to band together into unions, call strikes, and hit the streets, so be it.
But Gourevitch and Stanczyk go farther, asserting that the introduction of UBI is impossible until these union-building strategies have fully succeeded in establishing democratic socialism. Their joint article doesn’t say what policy changes are needed to build the power of the union movement and establish democratic socialism or why UBI should be last on the union-based, democracy-building agenda.[vi] The arguments I’ve made above about how important UBI is to promoting power to the people (both individually and as members of unions) support the conclusion that UBI should be near the top of that agenda.
Gourevitch and Stanczyk seem to assume the donor class has a blind spot. The 1% can see that UBI threatens their power but cannot see how union-building policies threaten it. Yet, they give no reason to believe the donor class has any such blind spot. We need to get money out of politics to help make most major progressive policy changes viable, but Gourevitch and Stanczyk’s selective defeatism is unfounded.
These indirect arguments against UBI distract from the deeper questions I asked above about the choice between a mandatory- and voluntary-participation economy. Gourevitch and Stanczyk give contradictory statements that can be construed as answers. At one point, they seem to weakly endorse UBI, writing:
- [W]e are prepared to grant that in a just society, some level of income support would be made available to everyone irrespective of whether she cared to do any kind of job.[vii]
That policy is UBI or at least something very much like it. They don’t explain whether they see it is as a UBI or how it might be different. The central reason I’m giving to support UBI is so that people can live decently “irrespective of whether [they] cared to do any kind of job.” If there’s a better mechanism to create a voluntary-participation economy, great: what is it? Why is a paper that ultimately endorses a policy very much like UBI called “the Basic Income Illusion?” Is “some level of income” meant to imply the UBI is low enough to maintain the threat of homelessness for people who might refuse jobs?
Gourevitch and Stanczyk seem to retreat from the weak endorsement when they write:
- [W]hen a livable basic income finally arrives, its function will not be to empower the individual worker against her capitalist bosses … Instead, the role … will be to limit the labor discipline that may be democratically imposed on all, whether by individual employee-owned workplaces or by genuinely majoritarian legislation.[viii]
And:
- If the idea of a liberating basic income is to have a place in an attractive political vision, then, we should think through, not how it will renovate capitalism, but its emancipatory purpose in an already functioning institutional socialism.[ix]
Again, UBI only comes at this point if it’s last on the worker-empowerment agenda, and I’ve argued it should be near the top.
The question of whether we should have UBI when a social democratic vision is otherwise complete—should we ever reach that point—gets to the competing ideals of mandatory and voluntary participation.
Literally, Gourevitch and Stanczyk’s statements merely ask us to think the question through. Their title, “the Basic Income Illusion,” implies that the authors believe once we think it through, we’ll reject it. But by leaving it as an implication, they avoid giving any reasons why future progressive, social democratic coalitions might want to maintain the same cruel power over common people that capital owners have held over them since the enclosure movement.
Other progressive philosophers, such as Stuart White, Gijs van Donselaar, and John Rawls, have argued explicitly for a mandatory-participation requirement without clearly stating whether this means that those who refuse to do what they’re told should be homeless and hungry.[x] In 1887, Richard Bellamy avoided that implication by explicitly stating that people who reject the job opportunities offered them under socialism should be jailed.[xi] Bellamy’s plan is in some ways more humane than the work-or-be-homeless strategy. Although prisoners lack freedom of movement and association, they are entitled to food, shelter, clothing, and medical care.
If there is a third strategy to enforce mandatory participation, I have not found it in a large survey of literature. I’ve addressed specific arguments of progressive UBI opponents such as Rawls, van Donselaar, and White elsewhere.[xii]
Now, in more general terms, let’s explicitly think through the choice between the conventional work ethic ideal of mandatory participation and what I call an indepentarian ideal of voluntary participation.
Most mandatory-participation supporters envision a progressive “social contract” in which all people participate in democratic decision making, and the majority makes a good faith effort to build a mutually beneficial social structure that no reasonable person could refuse. Ideally, we eliminate the situation in which one group imposes a work obligation on another, and create a society in which we, the people, impose it on ourselves. The most popular such vision over the last half century has been Rawls’s theory in which each person’s contribution to a mutually beneficial social project entitles them to a seat at the imaginary table where the distribution of benefits is determined. He argues, that because we all share in the benefits, we must all share in the burdens, and therefore, “everyone [who is able] works a standard working day.”[xiii]
This ideal is attractive, but I’ll try to convince you that a voluntary-participation ideal is better. In it, we recognize society as no more than it is: a bunch of people who are—as Rodney King said—“stuck here together for a while.” We ask of majoritarianism no more than it can deliver: the rule of a fallible majority. Imaging ourselves as part of that majority, we seek accord, to get everybody literally into agreement to our rules and requirements. But we admit that we will always fall short. Ruling coalitions in majoritarian democracies are capable of being oppressive. Because we’re stuck together, we have, among other things, a UBI as a check on the power of the people and institutions our rules favor.
To say that the ruling coalition might be wrong is not to say that it is always wrong. It might be fully right, partly right, or completely wrong. On a lot of issues, there’s room for reasonable disagreement. The majority ultimately has to rule, because as long as we’re stuck together, the only alternative is minority rule. But aware of our own fallibility, self-serving bias, status-quo bias, system-justifying bias, the possibility that power corrupts, and a host of other reasons, we are as modest, kind, and humane as we know how to be to people who dissent from the system we’ve created, in part, by rejecting any mandatory-participation requirement.
We, the ruling coalition, create rules and institutions with whatever mix of market and socialist elements we think works best. We ask for labor contribution but never demand it. We offer workers incentives like good wages, good working conditions; greater access to the Earth’s resources and the external assets we make out of them than people would get if they don’t work at all.
But if our incentives aren’t good enough to get everyone to come out and work, we don’t assume that we’re in position to judge whether those dissenters are being unreasonable. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be a truly disadvantaged person. We don’t know what it’s like to perform the worst jobs in society. And we don’t really understand the situation of anyone else who chooses to live off the lowest income our society has to offer. So, we respect their choices.
We protect voluntary participation by, among other things, making sure they have the best internal exit option we know how to give them: a generous UBI. This policy, in turn, helps ensure we are good to people who do participate, because it creates market pressure to reward disadvantaged workers with better wages and working conditions than they might otherwise command.
This conclusion is likely to be true even in a democratic socialist society dominated by unions and cooperatives for at least three reasons. First, UBI increases the power of disadvantaged workers within the firm relative to more privileged workers. Second, it increases the market power of cooperatives dominated by disadvantaged members relative to cooperatives dominated by more advantaged members. Third, it will decrease the relative power of individuals who might misuse supervisory positions to harass or otherwise make conditions worse for disadvantaged workers.
One might concede that my argument has value in protecting people from abuses but still uphold the ideal of society in which everyone contributes to a mutually beneficial joint project. That’s the conventional wisdom. Consider ten reasons to reject it.
First, even if labor is necessary for society, it is not necessarily ideal for labor to be the only recognized form of contribution. Imagine castaways on an island that has bountiful resources for the taking but needs a well. We could all pitch-in and dig the well together. But suppose one person, Mr. Howell, volunteers to dig it alone in exchange for more land than everyone else gets. Neither of these two proposed ways to divide the benefits and burdens of digging the well is inherently more ideal than the other. It’s all about what people want. If people differ significantly in their preferences for consumption and leisure, a universal work requirement makes everyone worse off.
Second, the example in which Mr. Howell digs the well illustrates the importance of passive contribution. Only Mr. Howell actively contributes to the joint project, but everyone else passively contributes. They consume Mr. Howell’s labor services by drinking water and pay for it by making do with less access to all other resources. Recognition of passive contribution is more ideal than a rigid active-contribution requirement because it gives everyone flexibility to do what they like better.[xiv]
Third, although political debate largely ignores it, the passive contribution of low-income people is massive: political rules, economic income, and social norms all reward high-income people. Considering how rarely disadvantaged people get their way, it’s possible, even likely, their passive contribution is more onerous than the active contribution of more privileged people.
Fourth, even if universal participation is first-best, mandatory participation might be an inferior approximation of that ideal than voluntary participation. In a truly first-best ideal of universal participation, everyone would agree to do the work. Once a ruling coalition feels the need to force people to participate, we’re out of the first-best ideal theory. We shouldn’t assume that the fallible majority group saying they’ve achieved the conditions everyone morally should work is more likely to be right than the fallible individuals saying the majority failed to achieve those conditions.
Fifth, a mandatory-participation supporter might reply by appealing to the social contract ideal of establishing basic rules that no one could reasonably reject. One might argue that people who refuse to work don’t really disagree; deep down they know they have a moral responsibility to contribute but suffer from weakness of will. Even ignoring passive contribution, I suggest that if policymakers in our luxurious modern economy resort to willpower to get people to work, they’re doing it wrong. If our economy is, as we’ve been told, mutually beneficial and far better than subsistence, we should be able to reward any work that actually needs doing in ways that are so remunerative and fulfilling that people gladly compete for the privilege of doing it.
Sixth, only a small portion of the work being done in the world is anything we might conceivably have a duty to do—such as providing basic food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and care for those who need it. Most of the economy is devoted to producing luxuries or fulfilling the whims of the wealthy. Much of the paid care work being done would not need to be paid if the relatives of those who need the care weren’t busy making the money they need to survive by providing services for ore privileged people. If we imagined a world in which we actually held people to a duty to do the essential labor our economy can’t do without, the workweek would be a lot shorter than working classes’ current obligation and a lot of unpaid work would become mandatory labor. Yet I doubt the stock brokers, supermodels, and rentiers of the world would be very happy about they and their children being forced to spend 10-hours per week caring for the elderly, working in chicken factories,[xv] and so on. If we’re not going to hold the privileged to an equally onerous duty to work on equally necessary work, we cannot with any consistency resort to the concept of “duty” and “weakness of will” to justify forcing the less privileged to accept the wages, working conditions, and social position we offer them.
Seventh, even in an ideal world, there might be room for reasonable disagreement about whether the economy is fair enough that it merits the contribution of the least advantaged. When ideal reforms are full in place, will there be wealthy investors; trust fund babies; highly paid television hosts, actors, accountants, university professors, and lawyers? I suggest that, even in ideal circumstance, it is always reasonable for people at the bottom to say, given the difference between my rewards and the rewards given to people at the top, I feel no obligation to work even if a majority made mostly out of working people voted that I should. For example, although I’m critical of excessive rentier income, I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate rentier income without also eliminating savings and entrepreneurial income, which society might need. If some of these issues are subjective, enforcing even a majority group’s opinion of a truly fair labor contribution could create a new form of oppression.
Eighth, even in a world so ideal that the ruling majority can infallibly identify and judge “bad,” “lazy” people, these bad, lazy people have children. You cannot punish parents without also punishing their children. You can’t make parents poor without also making children poor unless you separate them, which is rarely better for the child. If an ideal world is one where no child grows up in poverty, it must be one in which no parent lives in poverty—even if the parent “deserves” it.
Nineth, mandatory-participation supporters might charge me with wishful thinking for focusing on disadvantaged workers refusing bad jobs. To respond to this, I return to the example of Mr. Howell and the well from above. Mr. Howell does not want more people digging wells. The island only needs one well, and he only gets the extra share of land if he does the work by himself. If he were to support a work obligation, he would want it introduced only after he owns the well, when other people—regardless of talent—are forced to take lesser jobs serving him because they need access to his well. Of course, workers might benefit from more talented people doing more stuff, but we have to weigh those benefits against the cost of more competition for existing jobs and against the environmental cost of a society that devotes more and more of its human and environmental resources to production.
Tenth, whenever we, the ruling majority, want the labor of someone who doesn’t want to give it, we will be kinder, more humane people if we either do our best to elicit voluntary contribution (such as by making a better offer and appealing to their better instincts) and respect their decision if we cannot convince them. If that level of kindness is more ideal than policies maintaining the every-present threat of homelessness, we should free ourselves from belief that we’re capable of judging anyone’s contribution. To the nonparticipant, the rewards of passive contribution are more attractive than the rewards of active contribution. They might have a very good reason that you and I don’t understand. Just because we make more money than they do, doesn’t mean we know better.
Even if the reasons above aren’t enough to resolve all disagreement about whether voluntary or mandatory participation is more ideal, I will argue that the mandatory participation cannot survive the transition back to practical politics even if we establish the cooperative-based democratic socialism Gourevitch and Stanczyk envision. In other words, the mandatory-participation ideal is a poor guide for policy even in the best possible real-world circumstances.
If we idealize the vision a working-class majority taking power so that the mass of people in the middle and at the bottom hold the balance of power and impose mandatory participation on themselves rather than having it imposed on them by a more privileged other, we will forget that “workers” are not all the same.
We will never get close enough to the ideal in which a working-class majority made out of the unanimous voice of the bottom 51% imposes mandatory participation on itself. Institutions, even good ones like majoritarian democracy, cooperatives, and labor unions, inherently create insiders and outsiders. It’s usually easier to craft a ruling coalition out of the top 51% than the bottom 51%. If you’re lucky, you’ll get 51% out bits and pieces of the middle and lower middle. Most of the time, the people at the very bottom will be left out the ruling coalition, because the weakest and most vulnerable people are always farthest from the centers of power, least heard, and least understood. A middle-class coalitions easily convince themselves that they have been overly generous to the bottom 10% when they really don’t understand or care about them enough.
Self-serving bias and status-quo bias both suggests we will get closer to an ideal outcome if we disperse power widely—down to the individual level if possible. Strong unions and cooperatives can help. But have powerful unions and robust democracies everywhere and always been fair to disadvantaged people? Unskilled workers? Black workers? Immigrant workers? Women? Unpaid caregivers? Disabled people? People with undiagnosed mental and physical disorders? What mechanisms can we put in place to ensure unions and cooperatives will always be fair to them in the future?
I don’t think those mechanisms exist. We should heed the words of William Sloan Coffin: “No nation, ours or any other, is well served by illusions of righteousness. All nations make decisions based on self-interest and then defend them in the name of morality.”[xvi] We should, therefore, bring more humility into how we treat disadvantaged people.
It’s arrogant to say to the disadvantaged, you were right to object to laboring in the old system, but once our reforms are in place, the economy so fair that you’ll lose the moral right to refuse. The effort is too difficult even for well-meaning reforms to accomplish.
The pie in the sky of the truly fair economic system will never come down to Earth.
UBI offers a simple solution. If you can’t make the game fair, don’t force people to play.
Consider which policy minimizes the maximum loss. If voluntary-participation supporters are wrong, we are overly generous to the people who consume the least in our society. If mandatory-participation supporters are wrong, we use the threat of poverty and homelessness to force disadvantaged people to perform actions that they have no duty to perform for the benefit of more privileged people.
We, the majority, need to recognize the implications our own fallibility, stand in solidarity with the least advantaged and with their need for as much independence from the power structures we create as we can possibly give them. Therefore, let’s concede some independent power to everyone, in part, by introducing a UBI large enough to support a decent life so that people have the power to say no the labor market whenever they judge that its goals, wages, or working conditions are insufficient.
If all the dishwashers, janitors, slaughterhouse workers, and migrant laborers of the world decide to quit the day we introduce UBI, we should stop telling stories about them being bad undeserving of our respect and start trying to earn their respect.
If you want to be a good reformer, let the disadvantaged be the judge of whether you have created a socio-economic system that’s good enough, ethical enough, or mutually beneficial enough to deserve their labor contribution.
Don’t tell the oppressed when you’ve ended their oppression. They’ll tell you.
– Karl Widerquist, Lowfield House, Morehead City, North Carolina, May 24, 2025
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.
[i] See the works cited in Chapter 1 for responses to these kinds of arguments.
[ii] For responses to these kinds of arguments, see the works cited in the introduction.
[iii] Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk, “The Basic Income Illusion.”
[iv] Widerquist, “The Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations.”
[v] Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk, “The Basic Income Illusion.”
[vi] Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk.
[vii] Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk.
[viii] Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk.
[ix] Alex Gourevitch and Lucas Stanczyk.
[x] White, The Civic Minimum; Van Donselaar, The Right to Exploit: Parasitism, Scarcity, and Basic Income; Rawls, “Brief Comments on Leisure Time.”
[xi] White, The Civic Minimum; Rawls, “Brief Comments on Leisure Time”; Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887.
[xii] Widerquist, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income
[xiii] Rawls, “Brief Comments on Leisure Time.”
[xiv] The arguments in the last two paragraphs are similar to the Crazy-Lazy Challenge in Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?
[xv] Holding people to such a duty might help promote vegetarianism.
[xvi] http://www.robertewilliamsjr.com/2005/11/illusions-of-righteousness.html