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 thing. We all benefit from the work of others, and one might argue, in an ideal situation, we should all be required contribute to it, even if there are practical reasons to support UBI in the non-ideal situation we find ourselves in. This post addresses and rejects that argument.
The vast majority of the work done in our society is self-interested behavior; a significant amount of it is environmentally destructive or parasitic. Very little of the work people actually do is devoted to producing necessities. If there is some amount of labor we all have a duty to share, it has to be much less than the standard 40-hour work week.
Even assuming there is some labor we all have a duty to perform, a participation mandate is not the ideal way to handle it. In a truly ideal situation, everyone would agree about the necessary labor, and either everyone would do it voluntarily, or everyone would agree to a set of rewards that would be sufficient to elicit everyone’s participation.
Therefore, once you assert a supposed need to mandate participation, you have to admit we are out of the realm of the ideal situation. The typical response to this line of argument in political philosophy is to suppose that all people do recognize that there is a duty to work but because of weakness of will, parasitic motivation, or in short, laziness, they will choose not to work unless mandated. Even if that supposition is true, the situation remains non-ideal. The non-ideal element is the existence of these weak, parasitic, or lazy individuals.
But once we admit the possibility of this deviation from the ideal, we should consider another possible deviation from the ideal: that it is not the individuals refusing the work-requirement who are parasitic but the people setting the work requirement. Perhaps people with the power to set the mandatory-participation requirement exaggerate the duties of the lower- and middle-classes and down-playing the rewards they should get for participation.
Considering every state society, I know of, from the beginning of recorded history to the present, we have always erred on the side of demanding too many duties from and offering too few rewards to the middle- and lower-class. The power to mandate participation has been the most important tool to make that non-ideal situation possible. If we want to get closer to the ideal, we need to take that power away from the ruling coalition.
A UBI, large enough to create voluntary-participation economy, is not simply protection against potential abuses of powerful decisionmakers: it is an ideal in which people in society come together voluntarily, decide what needs to be done, and commit themselves to elicit rewards sufficient to get the necessary work done voluntarily. This, I submit, is a higher ideal and a kinder vision of community than one in which the majority of voters appoints a coalition with the power to decide what is and is not a duty, to determine what rewards for labor are appropriate, and to force less-advantaged people to accept those rewards no matter how much they might object.
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