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.
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
In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous “Four Freedoms Speech” included the familiar freedoms of religion and expression along with two less-familiar liberties: the freedom from fear and the freedom from want, which he defined as the assurance of a decent standard of living.[i]
A few years later, his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, participated in drafting the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Although the declaration did not reference the Four Freedoms Speech, it elaborated what could be called the freedom from want: “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 the freedom from want is so important. This section explains why the freedom from want in connection with the freedom from fear should be understood as fundamental to the exercise of virtually all other rights and freedoms. From that point, I’ll argue that UBI is an essential tool to help establish the freedom from want in the modern economy.
The costs of poverty are profound and well-documented as I discussed in an 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]
The costs of poverty go far beyond its direct effects. Human beings are not theoretical abstractions. We are animals with needs that must be met, or we will suffer greatly and die. You can imagine a theoretical abstraction without secure access to food, shelter, or clothing as a “free laborer,” but real human beings who lack secure access to the goods they need to survive or to the resources with which they could produce those goods themselves are in a state of fear, duress, and desperation. That state is easily exploited by others.
For example, Amartya Sen tells the story of Kader Mia, who left home during a riot when he knew people of his ethnic 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 to death.[iv] Few people face the level of acute desperation 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. Observations like these led 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.”[v]
Negative effects of poverty and inequality are not limited to low-income people. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett present an enormous amount of evidence that inequality negatively affects everyone, not just the people at the bottom. Inequality 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.[vi]
I discussed the ramifications of this study 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, we would all benefit if we secured the freedom from want for everyone. We can do it as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1968, “[T]he solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”[viii] Importantly, King recognizes poverty can be directly abolished. It might seem like an intractable economic problem that 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]
Because money is the legal right to access resources, poverty is the lack of legal rights to access enough resources to survive and to live a decent life. Poverty is not misuse of the money you have. People with money can live in squalor, but they cannot live in poverty. Subsistence farmers, fishers, hunters and gatherers might not live well, but they do not live in poverty. They are free from the desperation that propertyless people experience in most market economies. They are free from the extreme interference faced by American homeless people, who, although they are perfectly capable of building a shelter, have no place they can legally do it.[x]
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, the market sends food elsewhere or lets it rot. During the Bengal famine of 1943, for example, people starved to death in front of well-stocked cake and pastry shops.[xi] The cause of the Irish potato famine was not that people couldn’t eat potatoes, but that they had no potatoes to sell; no one wanted to buy their labor; and the British government had little or no support for them.
We have failed to eliminate poverty because we’ve never tried. We’ve never introduced the kind of program capable of abolishing it. A livable UBI is that kind of program. It secures the legal right to access goods and services or the resources with which they can produce their own goods.
The prevalence of poverty is related to the fact of market dependence. The market is the only means by which most of us can obtain the goods and services we need to survive and to thrive. So many generations have grown up in market dependent economies that it seems natural—so natural our language doesn’t have a widely recognized term for it.
But market dependence is highly unnatural. It’s a very recent phenomenon created by the forced movement of peasant farmers and nomadic foragers off the land during the enclosure movement in Europe and the colonial movement in most other places. Before the arrival of Europeans, few Native Americans north of the large-scale societies in Mesoamerica lacked the freedom from want. Few of them had any realistic fear of being unable to meet their basic needs for more than a day or two.[xii] Even in the early centuries of European settlement common resources were widely accessible, and most European-Americans were farmers who were capable of growing nearly everything they needed themselves.
The market has many advantages, but we could have established a market economy without robbing so many people of the freedom from want.
When Roosevelt talked about the freedom from fear, he focused on the fear of violence, but we should think about it in conjunction with the freedom from want. Even if you’re not in a state of want at the moment, you’re not really free from want as long as the threat of economic destitution hangs over your head as it does for most of us for most of our working lives. For those of us in the 99% (perhaps safer to say 90-95% at any given time in our working lives), dependence on the market in general implies dependence on the labor market in particular. I would guess that less than 10% of U.S. workers have sufficient savings to be free of that fear much before they become eligible for Social Security.
Despite what market propagandists say about low-income people “lacking opportunity” rather than “freedom,” labor market dependence neither follows from nor promotes freedom. Freedom from the fear of want is freedom in the negative sense of freedom from interference. We are labor-market dependent because aggressive governments seized land mostly from people who treated it as a commons and then made laws privatizing the Earth’s resources without making any provision to ensure everyone had access to enough resources to secure the freedom from want. 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.
Even if you don’t think about it very much, labor-market dependence affects your behavior. The default position in our economy is homelessness. When you come of age, if you fail to work for employers, fail to qualify for any government program, and fail to receive sufficient gifts or bequests, you will be destitute. Throughout your working life, as long as you fail to become independently wealthy, you will eventually return to that default position, if for whatever reason, you fail to live up to the demands of employers, clients, landlords, and banks.
You might enter the labor market because it makes great opportunities available to you, but whether your opportunities are great or terrible, you will enter the labor market because the default position for someone who refuses is homelessness. A system where the fear of want cruelly hangs over the heads of common people throughout most of their productive years has no claim to call itself “free trade.” The ever-present reality of labor-market dependence affects everyone who works for a living. We, the common people, take a lot of crap on the job that we wouldn’t accept otherwise. More on that issue in Section 2.
Although labor-market dependence is a fact of life for most Americans for most of their lives, it is largely absent from our political dialogue. We talk about dependency on redistributive programs and about cutting those programs in the name of independence, but doing so will only increase labor-market dependence and all its associated hardships. The only truly independent people in a market-dependent economy are the independently wealthy.
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 fear of poverty and economic destitution that are inherent to it. Introduce UBI: put a floor under everyone’s income large enough to meet their basic needs and give a little taste of independence to everyone.
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 many other social and economic problems easier to handle. It enhances freedom for the people who need it most and helps people right up the income scale. But to get there, we need to free our minds from our cultural commitment to the judgmental, mandatory-participation economy.
– Karl Widerquist, Al Najada Hotel Apartments, January 24, 2025 (revised, May 24, 2025, Lowfield Houe Morehead City, NC)
[i] Roosevelt, “President Franklin Roosevelt’s Annual Message (Four Freedoms) to Congress (1941).”
[ii] United-Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
[iii] Widerquist, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge.
[iv] Sen, Development as Freedom.
[v] Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality.
[vi] Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
[vii] Widerquist, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge.
[viii] King, Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? The technical differences between guaranteed income and UBI are not import for the debate here. To learn about them, see Widerquist, Universal Basic Income: Essential Knowledge.
[ix] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/03/hearafrica05.development
[x] Widerquist and McCall, The Prehistory of Private Property; Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy.
[xi] Sen, Development as Freedom.
[xii] Widerquist and McCall, The Prehistory of Private Property; Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy.