Basic Income Reconsidered

A universal welfare state is often described as a type of welfare state in which rights to income security are primarily based on citizenship or permanent residence. Comprehensive forms of welfare universalism rest on the idea that a substantial set of welfare rights should cover all members of society and that the welfare state will thus remain a concern for everyone. Such a welfare state does not mark out a separate group of needy people from the rest of the population.

Preventing unemployment, substantial inequality of resources, and unequal opportunities in the labor market are widely shared concerns in economically advanced welfare states. In recent years there has been an influential trend in both egalitarian and conservative thought emphasizing, in a much more pronounced way, the importance of linking income security to work requirements in tackling those challenges. In such ideals of welfare contractualism a minimum income is not an unconditional right of citizenship but something that one must earn (e.g., Giddens 1998; Layard 2005; Mead 2005; White 2003a). In order to remain eligible for a guaranteed minimum income, people must demonstrate that they are available for work, actively applying for work, and prepared to undertake other activities.

One idea that plays an important role in several attempts to reject a strong unconditional component in welfare state arrangements, and to back the present trend toward workfare and activation, is the view that social justice must be grounded in the idea of society as a productive system of cooperation for mutual benefit. In his critique of the basic income proposal, William Galston appeals to the Rawlsian point of departure that a theory of social justice is about “the fair organization of … a cooperative venture and a fair allocation of its joint products” (Galston 2001, 33). On this view, it seems, nonparticipants have no relevant claims on the fruits of this venture (at least not on grounds of social justice).

In order to define and introduce the central task of part II, I will begin this chapter by placing some of the most important claims of part I in a broader perspective. Chapter 2 identified a number of reasons for why the demands of equality of status and, more specifically, basic autonomy offer important grounds for why a basic income solution would be preferable to its conditional rivals. Up until now, I have assumed that there may be a broad compatibility between the objectives of promoting equality of status, on the one hand, and counteracting the impact of brute luck on people’s economic life prospects (i.e., equality of opportunity), on the other.

This chapter continues our exploration of how best to specify luck-egalitarian commitments to equality of opportunity and, thus, complement the status-egalitarian demands discussed in chapter 2. Philippe Van Parijs’s way of arriving at his radical conclusion that justice requires “the highest sustainable” basic income rests heavily on one interesting and controversial argument, namely, that the so-called employment rents, accessed through favorable jobs, belong to the category of resources to which all have an equal claim.

We have now reviewed a number of arguments for why schemes that provide unconditional payments to every member of society, irrespective of their willingness to work, may be superior to the work-tested minimum income programs of traditional welfare states. As discussed in the last two chapters, Philippe Van Parijs’s powerful neutrality-based justification of basic income argues that a universal arrangement of that kind serves to equalize access to certain external resources in a way that will expand people’s “real freedom” to do whatever they might want to do.

In the preceding chapters I have sought to establish that there are many reasons to find the idea of a universal and unconditional stake attractive if one accepts certain liberal-egalitarian starting points associated with the Rawlsian project. An unconditional set of universal social rights can be justified as a way of supporting a brute-luck-countering (maximin-guided, i.e., efficiency-sensitive) equalization of the freedom to do whatever one might want to do.