A common argument I hear to the basic income proposals I support is that basic income is a bad idea because it gives the government more power and thus, reduces our freedom. By encouraging dependency on the government, the government has more power to control our lives, and thus increasing the size of government in this sense is a gateway to tyranny. This is an argument that plays well with small government conservatives and libertarians I guess, but it's completely false. There are several major reasons for this.
1) The government already has this power, and basic income reduces it. The government controls many facets of our economics, manipulating the economic system to accomplish certain goals. There is a complex tax system, full of incentives and tax breaks and disincentives and penalties. The tax system is a huge carrot and stick. It provides incentives for behavior it deems good, and it provides disincentives for behavior it deems bad. Want to buy a house? Tax break. Want to pay off student loans? Tax break. Is this not power over you? Isn't manipulating your behavior via an incentive/disincentive system manipulating you? Same with the welfare system. While its incentive structure is a bit screwy because of the 'welfare trap", ultimately, there are many incentives to manipulate behavior. You get unemployment insurance if you "play by the rules" and get laid off for the "right" reasons, but for the wrong reasons? Screw you, you can starve in the street. The welfare system has work requirements, and job search requirements, and drug testing, lifetime limits, and tightly controls the behavior of those who are on it by ensuring they can only buy certain things, and are doing certain things to earn their right to have it, etc. Combining this with the tax system, and we have an incentive structure that strongly encourages citizens to behave in certain ways. To seek employment, to buy certain things, etc. You already can't live as you want to live. You are basically coerced into work via propertylessness, and are only "helped" by the system if you behave in certain ways. This is freedom? I guess for some it is, which brings me to the second point.
2) The freedom that this argument frames the issue on is one of right wing "negative freedom." It's basically an argument against the concept of government. Now, government is inherently freedom reducing in some ways. But this isn't a bad thing. By giving up our freedom to just go around killing people willy nilly like we can in the state of nature, we gain the freedom to be able to live our lives in peace without fear of being randomly killed by people. Sometimes reductions in freedom actually lead to greater freedom overall, because they change the environment to open up new possibilities for people to live their lives that wouldn't exist in a less regulated state. I reject the negative concept of freedom the right uses to define it, because I see it as the freedom to serve or the freedom to starve. This concept of freedom tends to be narrowly defined on the concept of "government" interfering with our lives, and the fact that without government no one *has* to do anything. I mean, you don't HAVE to accept employment, you don't HAVE to work 7 days a week for peanuts, you don't HAVE to do this, you don't HAVE to do that, but the thing is....you will. As surely as a bear craps in the woods. Why? Because in order to survive, you must take action to ensure your own survival. And this requires acquiring property working for others, because obviously the government or in ancapistan, some "rights enforcement agency" (read: Pinkertons) will protect the property claims of the rich and powerful. So, you're ultimately playing their game by their rules, and while you don't *HAVE* to, you certainly will, which is just as bad. Under this system, you don't have freedom to act as you want, because you are forced into servitude by your bodily needs. That being said, a positive view of freedom based on being able to do what you really want, is favorable to one without mere government interference. Without government interference, life is brutal and, well, sucks. "Nasty, brutish, and short" as Hobbes put it. The thing we actually want is for the government to be on our side and to structure an environment that gives us more choices for how to live our lives without harming others.
3) This brings us back to basic income. Karl Widerquist, a scholar who emphasizes basic income a lot, wrote a book called "Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom and the Power to Say No." Since the book is expensive and I got to read it free when he posted it to reddit a while ago, let me summarize. Karl Widerquist spends this book breaking down the assumptions of our system, and separates "status freedom" with "scalar freedom." Status freedom is the freedom given to you by status, whether you're free or a slave. Scalar freedom is your effective freedom to do what you want. And basic income gives people the freedom to live their lives without interference, and the freedom to effectively say no to labor, which is something our system desperately lacks. You're not free as long as long as the powers that be limit your scalar freedom to force you into unfavorable work arrangements that give you the short end of the stick and force you to slave your life away for profit. While the right likes to go on about the "right to work" and stuff, they're really talking about the right to work more for less money. What the right doesn't understand is that when you're free to work 7 days a week with no unions and no regulations, everyone ends up having to do so as long as they can't say no.
4) That being said, basic income actually gives people freedom, and going back to point 1, it scales back the government's ability to influence you. Remember that welfare system I mentioned above that is all about making people good little worker bees using a carrot and a stick? With a guaranteed income, an income given to all with no strings attached, peoples' freedom INCREASES, not decreases. And if we replaced the tax system with a flat or flat-ish rate in conjunction with that, where we got rid of all the loopholes and deductions and stuff outside of the most necessary ones, we remove the government's ability to use "incentives" there too. By simplifying the system and ensuring everyone gets treated equally, rather than having a complex system of incentives to pick winners and losers, the deserving and the undeserving, we maximize peoples' freedom by allowing them to choose for themselves how to live rather than being "incentivized" (read: coerced) to act a certain way.
That being said, no, basic income only reduces freedom if your idea of freedom is that the less government involvement the better. But I tend to adopt a more positive view of freedom, the idea to live one's life as one wishes. And in order to accomplish this, basic income is necessary. It reduces propertylessness that forces them into unfavorable work arrangements, and it simplifies the bureaucracy of the current system, reducing the government's ability to "incentivize" people to act in certain ways. We should not fear basic income. We should fear the system we have now. Basic income is a massive improvement in a lot of ways.
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