For all of its faults during the time of empire, the United Kingdom used to be a thriving hotbed of intellectualism. Not only was the United Kingdom the driver of the industrial revolution, it was also a land of rapid intellectual, scientific and political development.
These days, as the standard of public debate continues sinking to every more dispiriting lows, I think it's worth looking back and considering how the hell have things gone so wrong.
Background
Its obviously an over-simplification to start at any arbitrary point, but we must start somewhere, so the rise of liberalism in the 17th Century seems as good a point as any. It was from this period onward that the persecution of non-conformism declined dramatically.
In the 17th Century the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke established the concepts of the social contract and natural rights that gradually eroded the tyranny of the monarcy-state-church nexus.
The English Civil War resulted in the fall of the monarchy, but the powerful political elites who took the place of the monarchy imprisoned and marginalised radicals like John Lilburne ("Freeborn John") and the Levellers to prevent an egalitarian reformation of British society. Despite these efforts by the powerful elites to stamp out political and religious radicalism by persecuting non-conformists like the Levellers, Seekers, Quakers and the Diggers, the unstoppable trend towards liberalism and tolerance of of religious non-conformism had been set in motion.
It was never the case that persecution of non-conformity was eliminated entirely, but from the late 17th Century onwards the people of Great Britain found ever more freedom to express non-conformist political views, and to practice whichever religion they liked, or none at all for that matter.
Another visionary liberal philosopher to spring up in 17th Century Britain was to inspire the independence revolution in the United States. Thomas Paine's revolutionary essays inspired the movement that excised the monarchy-state-church nexus from vast territories of North America.
The vestiges of the tyrannical monarchy-state-church nexus persist in Britain to this day. The UK state is an anachronism with its monarch serving as joint head of state and head of the established church, its antiquated and unrepresentative electoral system and its unelected religious clerics in its bloated and entirely unelected House of Lords. However the power of the state to silence, imprison and execute critics of the establishment order has been gradually eroded, such that we can publish our republican sentiments, our anti-establishment political views and our non-conformist theological thoughts with little fear of being economically sanctioned, imprisoned or garotted by the monarchy-state-church nexus for airing such views.
The 19th Century heyday
The 19th Century wasn't just the heyday of the industrial revolution, it was an age of rapid public enlightenment and social progress: Libraries, educational institutions and museums sprang up all over the nation; education and basic literacy gradually became the norm rather than the privileges of the wealthy; and barbaric practices like slavery and child labour were abolished.
Against this backdrop of rising standards in literacy and freedom from oppression, Britain played host to an extraordinary array of political movements. Liberals, anarchists, religious non-conformists, Owenites, socialists, communists, libertarians, laissez-faire capitalists, free-thinkers, mutualists and syndicalists all competed for attention from an increasingly literate population.
Non-conformists and hetorodox political thinkers had a much more difficult time on the continent. A look at the lives of many of the most interesting European political thinkers of the age (Proudhon, Bakunin, Michel, Galleani, Malatesta, Blanqui ...) reveal lives interrupted by prolonged periods of imprisonment and exile. Britain was not free of political persecution by any stretch of the imagination, however the more liberal environment meant that London became a safe haven for all kinds of heterodox political thinkers including Marx, Engels, Herzen, Mazzini, Kossuth and Kropotkin.
In response to a furious letter from the Spanish embassy decrying Britain for harbouring political exiles in 1871 the British government declared that "all foreigners have an absolute right to enter the country and remain", and that they have the same right as British citizens to be "punished only for offences against the law".
Public intellectuals
The growing tolerance of unorthodox political and religious thought in the United Kingdom led to the rise of countless public intellectuals, many of whom worked to educate the public through the publication of essays and literature and were deeply involved in the political affairs of their age.
It's impossible to provide a definitive list of 19th Century public intellectuals, however naming just a few high profile individuals from the period goes to show how intellectuals were held in high public regard: John Stuart Mill, William Morris, George Holyoake, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Marshall, Alexander Graham Bell.
The high public profile accorded to intellectuals continued well into the 20th Century. It's unlikely that anyone but the most determined early-mid 20th Century dullard would have managed to remain completely unaware of the writing and political views of the likes of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, John Maynard Keynes, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley...
The late 20th Century onwards
Who are the great British public intellectuals, philosophers and political theorists of the 21st Century?
There are obviously a great deal of very intelligent people in Britain, who could rightly be considered public intellectuals, however, it seems to me that very few of them have a large enough public profile that they would be recognisable to the majority of people.
Tim Berners-Lee deserves enormous credit for inventing the World Wide Web, but how many people could tell you what he was famous for just from hearing his name or seeing his photograph? The same goes for a number of other modern day intellectuals. What percentage of the general public could even identify the likes of Robert Skidelsky, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Tariq Ali, Susie Orbach, AC Grayling, Andrew Motion, Alan Bennett, Mary Beard or Roger Penrose?
The only high profile public intellectual I'm completely confident that the majority of British people could identify is Stephen Hawking.
When it comes to politics the situation is utterly embarrassing. When a revisionist halfwit like Michael Gove is considered to be one of the great intellectuals of the Tory party, and a the likes of Tristram Hunt and Gordon Brown are lauded as the great intellectuals of the Labour Party we know that we're in trouble.
Anti-intellectualism and stupification
The United Kingdom has turned from a country that celebrated intellectualism to one that treats it with suspicion and contempt, especially if intellectuals (these days so often prefaced with "so-called" by the tabloid press) dare to voice a political opinion that goes against the established orthodoxy. When people speak out against the right-wing economic orthodoxy that has dominated UK politics for almost four decades, they are hounded by the tabloid press. In my view an awful lot of public intellectuals are afraid to speak out against the right-wing economic orthodoxy for fear of the abuse they'll suffer from the right-wing press.
The hounding of public figures who speak out against the orthodoxy is not the only way in which the tabloid press helps to control public debate. Newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail are deliberately written in the vocabulary of children in order to make their glib right-wing political tropes accessible to even the least intelligent adults. It's not just conjecture that the tabloid newspapers have contributed to the stupification of the British public either. Research has shown that reading a tabloid newspaper is worse for your vocabulary than not reading a newspaper at all, and that "the presence of tabloid newspapers in the home during childhood has been linked to poor cognitive attainment at age 16".
It's not just the tabloids that are to blame. Generations of politicians have turned the UK education system into an absolute shambles, where children who attend state schools are denied the absolute basics in critical thinking, philosophy and economics and taught that correct answers are handed down to them by authority to be uncritically rote learned and regurgitated upon demand in order to obtain rewards in the form of grades. It obviously makes no sense for the establishment to teach future generations critical thinking skills and basic macroeconomics, otherwise they'd grow up to ask questions and find out that their own rational self-interest is not best served through continued support for an out-of-touch establishment minority that is clearly intent on hoarding political power for their own class and enacting ideologically driven economic policies that enrich the already rich at the expense of everyone else.
The declining standard of political debate
The standard of political debate in the UK continues suffering a steep decline. People seem to no longer even understand the meanings of fundamental political words and phrases. Terms like "communism", "anarchism", "liberalism" and "socialism" have been weaponised, so that simply calling somebody a "communist" is somehow considered sufficient to discredit their entire position, without any obligation for the term communist to even be understood, let alone it be demonstrated that the accused actually subscribes to any of the numerous communist ideologies.
We live in a world where hurling words like "communist" around as if they're crude insults rather than political words with specific meanings or publishing pictures of the opposition leader looking odd while he eats a bacon sandwich are considered dynamite by the political right. Meanwhile many on the left seem to think that simply calling David Cameron a "pigfucker" (instead of criticising any of the countless socially and economically destructive policies Cameron's government have inflicted on the UK) is a debate winning tactic, rather than the kind of crude unsubstantiated assertion that makes the left look like a bunch of ranting extremists.
The rise of someone like David Cameron was pretty much inevitable given the stupification of the electorate. Cameron has proven himself an egregious liar, an abuser of the English language, a snide and manipulative person who refuses to answer direct questions or act in good faith and a coward who is terrified of having to think on his feet (hence his refusals to participate in unscripted public debates). However, despite all of this evidence that David Cameron is a fundamentally dishonest charlatan and clearly the least intellectually capable Prime Minister in living memory, somehow over 11 million people saw fit to actually vote in favour of keeping him in power!
It doesn't matter whether you agreed with the likes of Benjamin Disreali, John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill, William Beveridge or Clement Attlee, it's pretty much impossible to argue that they were stupid people who just read out a load of scripted nonsense and ran away from any form of actual debate. These were intelligent men of principle who knew what they were talking about and were unafraid of open honest debate.
I'm not Tory but I'm pretty damned sure that the likes of Disreali and Churchill would be utterly appalled that the Conservative party is now being led by such an intellectually stunted, snide and downright dishonest chancer like David Cameron.
What can be done?
It seems that little can actually be done as long as the parliamentary authorities allow David Cameron to continue repeatedly evading questions and blatantly lying to parliament, and as long as the mainstream media refuse to hold David Cameron and the Tories to account for their litany of lies and broken promises to the public.
David Cameron can sign a "contract with the electorate" then simply have every trace of it deleted from the Tory website when it became clear that they'd broken nearly every pledge it contained; he can lie to parliament that the UK has been "bankrupted"; he can lie to the public that the Tories are reducing the national debt (when they've actually created more new debt since 2010 than every Labour government in history combined); he can use all kinds of Orwellian language to claim that black is white and white is black; and he can lie over and over and over again about the leader of the opposition. He can do all of this and get away with it because virtually nobody holds him to account for it.
Even if David Cameron is removed from power, if the means to lie, distort, adopt bad faith positions and spout logical fallacies remains so desperately unchallenged, his successors would be fools to limit themselves to honest, good faith debate.
The poet WH Auden once wrote that "Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth". Surely nobody believes that it's possible to engage in this kind of honest debate with the likes of David Cameron? Surely nobody believes that David Cameron would voluntarily stick to the truth, argue in good faith or answer direct questions (rather than repeatedly evade them with a load of heavily scripted and largely inaccurate tabloid style rhetoric and snide political point scoring).
Unfortunately, until the public begin to demand a higher level of public debate from their politicians, any politician who does try to adopt the traditional British form of debate (by limiting themselves to avoiding lies and smears, arguing in good faith and actually answering the questions they're asked) would be voluntarily tying their hands behind their back while allowing other less scrupulous politicians to repeatedly punch them below the belt to cheers of delight from the tabloid-minded masses.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I find a lot of theological writing to be tortured, laborious, inaccessible and uninspiring, a real chore to wade through and a thoroughly unrewarding investment of my time. Other examples I find lucid, powerful and thought provoking. In this article I'm going to consider what value can be found in religious contemplation.
Avoiding absolutism
I'm of the opinion that much of value can be taken from things that have stemmed from religion and religious contemplation. I don't necessarily have to agree with something for me to see some inherent value in it, or for it to have at least impacted and informed my worldview.
To give a rather crude example of how good can be found in religion, many years ago I did repair work on a number of Church of England churches. I've never been Church of England and I have deep reservations about the entanglement between the CofE and the UK political system. As a child I attended a number of state funded Church of England schools and grew to deeply resent the religious indoctrination I was subjected to from a very young age. The idea of an official state religion with special privileges in the political establishment and in society at large concerns me deeply, especially as I have studied the terrible persecutions of heterodox religious groups and individual thinkers enforced by the Church of England-UK state nexus in the past.
However my deep revulsion at this anachronistic Church of England status as an Official State Religion with special social and political privileges could never be enough to destroy the beauty and wonder of repairing an ancient building in the English summer, the tranquility of the Churchyard, the wind in the yew trees, the centuries of dedicated craftsmanship invested in the building and the profound sense of shared community history.
For all of the bad that has been perpetrated by man against man in the name of religion, good has sprung of it too. Beautiful religious architecture is one example and thought-provoking religious philosophy is another.
To deny that there is that of both good and bad in vast entire aspect of human endeavour is to take a militant absolutist stance.
Swami Vivekananda
"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or mental discipline, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free.
This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details."
In my view this Swami Vivekananda quote contains great truths born of religious contemplation.
I sincerely believe that you don't have to be of a religious persuasion to see the truth in what Swami Vivekananda was saying, although I can understand how stuff like the concept of "divinity" could be offputting to those of irreligious sentiments. However I don't consider the replacement of the overtly religious concept of "divinity" with the philosophical concept of "transcendence" or the more psychological concept of "self-fulfilment" to be unacceptable debasements the essential meaning of the first paragraph.
Transcendence
"Any person can achieve transcendence. The goal is to achieve self-fulfilment through self-discipline and active engagement with the world. Freedom can be found through constructive activity, contemplation or both."
To rephrase and slightly simplify the first paragraph in this manner does not eradicate the essential meaning, but it frees it from the kind of overtly religious undertones that many find offputting. Could anyone now disagree with this statement?
Dogma
The second paragraph is particularly close to my own beliefs about the fundamental distinction between spirituality and dogma.
It is possible to believe in God(s) without believing in organised religious dogma, just as it is possible to for people to devote their lives to practicing organised religious dogma without ever really contemplating the existence and nature of the God(s) that their religious order is actually dedicated to. The two things are separate, but linked by centuries of association.
A declaration of the primacy of individual enlightenment over religious dogma resonates strongly with my libertarian and anarchist sympathies. Of course we should be free to develop our own personal worldviews, whether we believe in God(s) or not. Thus if religion is to exist then it should exist to encourage and support people in their own self-enlightenment, not to enforce an ideological orthodoxy through indoctrination and the punishment of transgressions.
Conclusion
Of course people are still free to contest that nothing good has ever stemmed from religion and sneer at the use of words like "divinity" if they want to see the world like that. However such a stance betrays naive absolutist thinking. To witness attempts to occupy some kind of intellectual high ground by decrying anything that has ever stemmed from religion is to witness a bold scrabble towards an imaginary plateau of rational enlightenment, the like of which will forever remain unobtainable to those who close their perceptions through simplistic absolute judgements about incredibly complex issues.
However you define your goal in life (enlightenment, transcendence, self-fulfilment, divinity ...) there are many paths to achieve it, however one of the most impassable obstacles on any path is closed-mindedness.
Like I said in the intro, I find an awful lot of theological writing to be turgid, unrewarding and often deeply hypocritical or contradictory stuff, but amongst all the dross there are still many gems to be found. Concepts that are concisely expressed and thought provoking to those with the openness of mind to contemplate the meaning of things without necessarily accepting them at face value.
To conclude I'll leave you with another Swami Vivekananda quote:
"To believe blindly is to degenerate the human soul. Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly."
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I'm going to present another article to you in the form of a riposte to something someone said on my Facebook page. If this writing style annoys you I do apologise, but I do find that my ideas often flow much more freely when I'm replying to something, than if I'm building up something of my own from scratch.
I reckon that this reply contains some ideas (some of them my own, but most of them other people's) that might be worth sharing. I suppose it's up to you whether you consider them worth sharing or not. Anyhow, if you like any of them, you can share them, keep them, reuse them, even pass them off as your own for all I care.
The comment in question was one of the very many critical comments about Russell Brand that always appear whenever I mention him. Although it was, in my opinion, an unnecessarily harsh criticism, it was certainly a good deal more thought provoking that the "He's an utter cock who makes me so furious I can barely type a coherent sentence" type diatribes, that for some reason are written almost exclusively by men.
Whatever it is that makes so many people actually take the time and effort to type such vitriol about him, they come across as being so disproportionately angry that I can't help imagining that (for whatever reason) they have built some kind of totemic hate figure in their minds that has the face and mannerisms of Russell Brand.
This is the comment:
"When [Brand] stops pretending his ideas are actually his own I might give him a second thought."
This is my reply:
I wonder how many of your ideas are entirely your own? And how many you have taken from other sources such as your parents, your teachers when you were at school, books, television, magazines, right-wing propaganda sheets, or other people you've met?
I know it takes me a lot of hard work to think of completely new ideas, and even then I often find that my 'brilliant new insight' has has actually been thought of and written down before (on many occasions by someone living on the other side of the planet!).
When I do have a really novel insight, that apparently nobody has thought of before, it almost always comes from the synthesis of two or more separate ideas that originated with other people. Are these synthetic ideas and concepts illegitimate? Can I claim them as my own, or would to do so be a fraud as heinous as the one for which you have mentally excommunicated Russell Brand?
If it is a sham for us to build our ideas upon the work of others, or to cumulatively develop new ideas through conversation and debate, where do we draw the line?
If the reuse or repetition of other people's ideas are excluded as being outrageously deceitful or dishonest, I reckon we'd have to row back quite far wouldn't we? I mean all of human knowledge is built upon the recycling of other people's ideas really isn't it?
If the reuse of other people's ideas is prohibited, I reckon we'd have to go back to something as fundamental as"I think therefore I am" in order to define our own existence without accepting other people's ideas and reusing them as our own. But then, if we're being proprietary about who ideas actually belong to, "I think therefore I am" must belong to Rene Descartes (unless someone else thought of it before him of course), so in order to avoid committing the deceitful and excommunicable offense of using ideas that originated with other people, we'd all each have to define our own unique philosophical foundation stone on which to build our wordviews from scratch upon, which sounds a tad time consuming and unrealistic to me.
I'm definitely not proprietary about my own ideas. That's why I give all my stuff away on the Pay as You Feel principle, and encourage others to share my work and quote me as freely as they like. The more people who see some use in my ideas and borrow them for themselves the better as far as I'm concerned. But I'm still not going to pretend that these ideas don't take time and effort to develop and refine into something that is actually worth sharing, or that all of them are uniquely my own.
I know that I have to work really hard so that I can continue to provide alternative perspectives in my writing, but I'm never going to have the arrogance and lack of humility to pretend that all of these ideas are entirely my own work. My ideas are built upon a foundation of knowledge upon knowledge upon knowledge, all of which has been been acquired, modified, synthesised and shared by billions of other people throughout all of recorded history and backwards further through time into the depths of ancient pre-history, before it ever got to me.
Maybe brilliant and unique insights flow like a never ending river through your mind? (I'm sure we'd all be very jealous, unlike you of course)
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Universal Basic Income (sometimes called Unconditional Basic Income, Citizens Income or just Basic Income) is a proposed economic system in which all adults within the economy receive a guaranteed basic income irrespective of whether they have a job or not. It is a very interesting proposal which finds support from across the political spectrum, especially amongst socialists and libertarians.
Arguments in favour
Technology and automation: As technology and automation improve, the requirement for labour in the economy falls. However, the pace of technological advancement is retarded if the public cannot afford the outputs of advanced technology and automation. If the public have their basic human needs met, then they have more wealth to invest in consumption of the outputs, further driving technological advancement.
Wealth Redistribution: Wealth redistribution is economically beneficial because of the Marginal Propensity to Consume (poor & ordinary people spend more of their income than the wealthy). The more wealth that is spent, rather than hoarded, the faster the economy will develop.
Efficiency: Universal Basic Income is the most efficient form of wealth redistribution because there is no need for a massive and expensive bureaucracy to means-test recipients. The only checks would be whether the recipient is a citizen of the state, and whether they are classified as an adult, which would massively reduce the bureaucratic cost overheads of the welfare system.
Smaller government: The introduction of Universal Basic Income would reduce the economic burden of the welfare system through the elimination of almost all means tested benefits and associated bureaucracies.
Reduced crime: Crime rates will be reduced because the Universal Basic Income would effectively eliminate absolute poverty, and massively reduce the economic desperation that motivates a large proportion of criminal behavior such as theft (a Basic Income trial project in Namibia recorded a remarkable 42% reduction in crime).
Balanced Labour Market: The labour market has become ever more imbalanced ever since the rise of neoclassical pseudo-economic dogma, and the attacks on trade unions and labour rights. Workers would no longer be compelled to work in order to meet their basic human needs, so employers would have to offer high wages and good terms and conditions in order to attract workers. Exploitative employment practices would be curtailed and the worker would have greater freedom to pursue the employment that they choose, rather than doing awful jobs for crap wages in order to stave off absolute destitution.
Innovation and small businesses: If citizens are guaranteed a basic income to meet their basic human needs, the investment of time and wealth into the establishment of new businesses would be significantly more attractive and carry significantly less risk. The evidence from trials supports the conclusion that the introduction of such a system would increase the number of business start-ups.
Better capitalism: The resulting boom in small businesses would improve capitalism by increasing the diversity of the capitalist economy, and by increasing competition within existing markets. Increased diversity would lead to a more robust economy capable of withstanding extrogenous shocks, and more competitive markets would result in greater competition and efficiency.
Social justice: If the basic human needs of all citizens are met automatically, then the requirement on charity and state administered welfare is dramatically reduced, meaning that those with charitable intentions can assist the needy elsewhere in the world, rather than fighting to combat poverty in their own developed nations.
Arguments against
Loss of work incentive: Opponents argue that the incentive to work would be destroyed, and that capitalism would grind to a halt without the fear of destitution driving workers to continue working. This objection is not supported by the experimental data, which shows that the vast majority of people continue to work, even if their basic human needs are met. Trials in North America showed that the only demographics to significantly reduce their working hours were new mothers (to spend time with their babies) and teenagers/young adults (who spent additional time in education). The trial in Namibia actually showed a significant increase in economic activity, due to the increase in economic demand and the establishment of new businesses.
Idleness: One of the most commonly wielded criticisms is that if a guarantee that the individual's basic human needs are met is given, then the individual will be inclined towards idleness. Not only is this concern disproved by the trials that have been carried out, it is also disproved by an appeal to "common sense". If having sufficient wealth that our basic human needs are met causes idleness, how is it possible to explain the fact that multi-billionaires like Warren Buffet or George Soros carry on working, when they have accumulated enough wealth to provide their basic human needs for ten thousand lifetimes or more? Why do actors like Keanu Reeves carry on working, when they have made more than enough money to live in comfort for the rest of their lives? Why do sportsmen carry on working even after they have become multi-millionaires? How is it possible to explain the fact that the current UK government is absolutely stuffed full of multi-millionaires? If having "enough to survive" was a disincentive to work, then all of these people would surely have retired to a life of idle luxury. The only way that this objection makes any kind of sense is if you accept the ludicrous right-wing stance that the rich are best motivated by more money, and the poor are best motivated by the threat of absolute destitution.
Something for nothing: Another one of the most common objections is the "why should people get something for nothing" argument. This kind of attitude lies behind the irrational British obsession with welfare spending. It is estimated that the UK economy loses £120 billion a year to tax-dodging, however this issue is completely dwarfed (in terms of column inches and public opinion) when it comes to the cost of welfare, of which only £1.2 billion is claimed fraudulently. The British public are easily riled with the sense of injustice that they must work hard, whilst others have a roof over their head and food in their belly despite not having a job. The sense of injustice is a powerful emotion, and the right-wing press deliberately weave it into their anti-welfare narratives, but it in economic terms it is a meaningless objection to Universal Basic Income, because if everyone is entitled to an income that guarantees them a basic standard of living, whether they work or not, the objection that the unemployed are getting something that the employed don't no longer carries any weight at all.
Reciprosity: Another objection is that the guaranteed income is basically unconditional, and that means that there is no conditionality that the recipient must put anything back into the economy. This objection demonstrates a basic lack of economic literacy because the recipient will either spend it (creating economic demand) or save it (creating the capital reserves that the capitalist system requires in order to fund the credit economy). The only way that it would be possible for the individual to extract the wealth from the economy entirely would be through off-shoring it, but that is a problem of capital flight and tax-dodging, not a problem with the principle of unconditional income.
Welfare for the rich: Another objection is that the Universal Basic Income would result in payments to citizens that are already wealthy, and have no trouble meeting their basic human needs. In my view, this is a particularly short-sighted objection for two reasons. Firstly, because making the payment conditional on wealth and income would necessitate a large bureaucracy in order to means test everyone, which would undermine one of the main benefits (efficiency); and secondly, because if the wealthy and powerful (generally high-tax payers) are excluded, they are likely to oppose the scheme because they are paying for it, but getting nothing back. If guaranteeing the basic human needs of the majority in the most efficient way possible must come at the price of giving the already wealthy "a bit extra" too, then so be it. To hopelessly compromise the whole concept of a universal benefit out of a desire to make sure that the rich don't get a share of it would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.
Inflation: Of all of the regularly stated objections, the only one that carries any significant economic weight is the threat of inflation. It should be fairly easy to understand how this might happen. Take rent for example: If the idle rentier class is aware that their tenants are in receipt of a monthly payment designed to meet their basic human needs, it is clearly in their financial self-interest to then massively increase the rental charge so that it takes the entire amount (and probably a bit more for good measure). An example of this kind of rent seeking behavior can be seen in the UK childcare sector after the introduction of Child Tax Credits. The childcare providers knew that working families were getting a payment from the government to cover the cost of childcare, so they raised the cost of childcare so much that the UK now has the most expensive childcare in the developed world (33% of family income, as compared to the OECD average of just 13%) meaning that the Child Tax Credit allowance is nowhere near enough to cover the inflated cost of childcare. If Universal Basic Income is introduced, then it must be done with a package of anti-inflationary measures (such as rent caps) or the value of the payment will soon be eroded away through the rent seeking behavior of the idle rentier class.
Another solution to the rent seeking behaviour of the idle rentier class could be to ensure that the UBI payment is linked to the cost of living, so that if the cost of rent, energy rates and water bills go up 10% in a year, the UBI payment would rise proportionately. This would of course result in inflation, but the inflation wouldn't end up driving ordinary people into poverty because they would be getting an inflation adjusted UBI payment to meet their basic needs.
Disclaimer
I've outlined some of the arguments for and against Universal Basic Income.
The problem is that most of the arguments in favour are backed by
empirical evidence and sound economic reasoning, but most of the commonly raised
arguments against don't make any sense at all from an economic perspective, are
contradicted by the evidence, and amount to little more than opinion. This means that it is absolutely impossible to construct a "balanced" article without giving the
completely false impression that the arguments against are somehow equal
to the arguments in favour, when aside from the valid concerns over
inflation, they are transparently not.
Politics
The concept of Universal Basic Income is compatible with several political ideologies, especially socialism and libertarianism. I would also argue that it is also compatible with most forms of free-market capitalism (apart from the extremely rabid variety that opposes any kind of welfare intervention whatever).
Socialism
Perhaps the most famous left-wing advocate of universal income was the British philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell, who wrote in 1918 that "those who choose not to work
should receive a bare livelihood, and be left completely
free" and that under such a system "The dread of unemployment
and loss of livelihood would no longer haunt
men like a nightmare".*
Other left-wing advocates for the Universal Basic Income include James Meade, who argues that it represents the only way by which full employment can be regained, and the Belgian philosopher and economist Phillippe van Parijs, who founded the European Basic Income Network in 1987.
Libertarianism
Libertarianism can crudely be divided into two schools, and advocates of the Universal Basic Income can be found in both of them.
Left-libertarianism
One of the early left-libertarian advocates of Universal Basic Income was the American economist Henry George. He proposed a progressive tax system where tax would be levied upon land and under which every citizen would receive a basic income called a "citizens' dividend". The benefit of such a Land Value Tax system is that tax is levied upon wealth, and not upon consumption or income.
In recent years the Green Party of the United States has proposed a universal income for all adults regardless of health, employment, or marital status,
in order to minimize government bureaucracy and intrusiveness into
people's lives.
Right-libertarianism
Many Conservatives might be inclined to oppose Universal Basic Income because they have been conditioned to hate the welfare state, but many of the ideologues of the neoclassical ideology that the Conservative thinker implicitly supports are advocates of forms of Universal Basic Income. These advocates include Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Gary Johnson (the Libertarian party candidate in the 2012 & 2016 US Presidential election).
Right-libertarians often propose a form of conditional Basic Income called Negative Income Tax, where people earning below a certain income threshold receive supplemental payment from the government instead of paying taxes to it.
Free Market Capitalism
One might assume that the concept of universal welfare is completely at odds with free-market capitalism,
but it isn't. Universal Basic Income would increase the competitivity of the market by freeing people from concerns over their basic human needs, and giving them the liberty to start their own businesses. A rise in the number of small businesses would increase market competition and promote greater efficiency.
If the free-market capitalist believes in any form of welfare at all, then the logical form to support would be the form that involves the least government interference and the smallest amount of costly bureaucracy, which would quite clearly take the form of some kind of universal income, rather than a bureaucratically administered means-tested benefit.
Conclusion
Universal Basic Income is a very interesting idea. There are numerous research projects being conducted all over the world, meaning we will learn more about the benefits and pitfalls.
It is clear that the underlying principle of a universal bureaucracy-free welfare system has a great deal of appeal to people from either side of the political spectrum, given that it has supporters from either extreme (from Bertrand Russell to Fredrich Hayek) and many in between.
Many of the critics rely on economically illiterate objections such as the "something for nothing" complaint or faux concerns about "idleness".
By raising such ludicrous concerns that the poor and ordinary would cease work at the very instant their basic human needs are met (whilst ignoring the fact that the rich continue to work despite their basic human needs being met many times over), the opponent is essentially admitting that their view of capitalism relies upon exploitation of the fear of destitution, rather than the willing participation of the workers.
Another thing that this kind of "something for nothing" objection reveals is the absurd idea that the only way in which it is possible to contribute to society is through paid labour. The idea that the individual is incapable of contributing anything at all to society apart from through submission to capitalist exploitation. This stance is ludicrous nonsense, not only because the individual would contribute to the economy every time they spent or saved their Universal Basic Income, but also because non-remunerated activities such as bringing up children, caring for elderly or disabled relatives, volunteering for charities or investing time in unpaid endeavours such as education, writing or the arts are all clearly contributions to society, it's just that they are much less easily monetised by the "cost of everything, value of nothing" brigade, so they are dismissed as worthless "non-contributions".
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