One fear about Universal Basic Income (UBI) is that it could cause rents to increase, partially or entirely diverting the benefit of UBI to landlords. The real estate market has a lot of underlying problems that need to […]
A citizens group in Oregon is collecting signatures to get an Alaska-style dividend (essentially a small Basic Income) on the ballot in Oregon during the 2024 elections. Here’s how the group describes its effort:
Mandatory Participation Series Contents According to Henry David Thoreau, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I think it’s more accurate to say the mass of people lead lives of manufactured desperation. We, as a people, are not in a […]
Mandatory Participation Series Contents In any earlier post in this series,[1] I argued that the ideal of a UBI society is one in which we all commit to respecting each individual’s right to refuse to any and all work […]
Mandatory Participation Series Contents For centuries, we have been presented with two political visions: centralized collectivism and a highly selfish conception of individualism, as if these two visions or something in between were the only possibilities. By this collectivist vision, […]
Mandatory Participation Series Contents Rather than referring to a hypothetical social contract, some critics of UBI argue that taxation, regulation, and redistribution of income and wealth violate a natural right to private property and supposedly make people less free from […]
Mandatory Participation Series Contents UBI skeptics might point to psychologists who say humans have a strong, deep-seeded desire for a meaningful life, to work and contribute to their fellow humans. People who fail to find such meaning tend to be […]
Mandatory Participation Series Contents Not all of the arguments above challenge the belief that a mandatory-participation economy is the ideal if, when, and where it is possible. Working for others is not always a bad; very often, it’s a good […]
Mandatory Participation Series Contents Most of us, of course, don’t view ourselves as using the threat of homelessness to get people to accept bad jobs, low wages, and poor working conditions. The ideal of the conditional safety net is an […]
Mandatory Participation Series Contents Programs with genuine conditions cannot eliminate poverty, homelessness, or economic destitution because they have to have some punishment for people who fail to fulfill their conditions. Either the conditions are phony, meaning that they are so easy no […]