Mandatory Participation Series Contents
Virtually any new idea meets with fallacious, knee-jerk criticisms. UBI is no exception. Some of the most common such criticisms of UBI portray it as being against paid work, property, or the market economy.
Paid work is fine if people can freely choose or refuse it. To accuse someone who is against forced work of being against work is like accusing someone who is against rape of being against sex.
This argument isn’t about private property or the market economy. If all resources were publicly owned, and individuals could not access them without permission of public officials, that system would be just as much a mandatory-participation economy as ours is today. UBI is fully compatible with the private property system. If you think the market economy is going to fall apart without the forced participation of 99% of its workers, you must think it’s a very fragile system. My book, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge, argues that there’s every reason to believe a highly livable UBI is sustainable.
Labels such as “socialism” or “communism” are primarily used as meaningless scare words for any progressive policy. So many different ways to organize an economy are possible that it is folly to portray a continuum between “capitalism” and “socialism.” UBI is actually rather individualistic, giving power to middle- and working-class people against both private and public power structures.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of the posts in this series were written with the intention of going into my forthcoming book, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge for MIT Press, and many, if not most, of the ideas presented here did make it into the book, but the publisher suggest I soften the wording and some of the arguments, because as is, in this version of it, “the anti-UBI crowd seems like a bunch of mustache-twirling robber barons,” and she rightly thought that the antagonistic stance would be less convincing than more confrontational one here. So, for the book, I made those changes, but I liked what was left out as well. I thought there must be a place for it. And I decided that place was on my blog. I refer everyone to the book because it has a different approach; because it benefits from peer review, copyediting, and more extensive proofreading; and because it has important ideas that aren’t here. Also, many of the arguments here are developed more fully in other books and articles of mine, most of which you can find on my website: www.widerquist.com.
Karl Widerquist, Karl@Widerquist.com