So, I'm not really necessarily sold on the book idea I mentioned previously, but I am investigating it. To be fair it's been something I've had in mind for a while, and a lot of books I've read over the past year were because I wanted to consider writing my own, but I don't just want to copy everyone else's, I want to actually build my own brand and make my own arguments. This makes things harder than I thought. There are plenty of basic guides to UBI. And now I'm reading Philippe Van Parijs' "A Radical Proposal for a Free and a Sane Society". It's been on my list for a while, and given my renewed drive on the subject, I ended up going with this one.
And it's good. Unfortunately it does do a lot of the work for me where he argues for UBI far more persuasively I can. But, I did read a chapter discussing the history of public assistance, and there was something in there that did relate back to my previous premise about the world not being "fallen" and how we got to get out of the thumb of Christianity and its influence on modern society. That said, i would like to discuss the Christian history of social assistance and how it is full of contradictions that lead to it being an inherently bad policy vs something like a basic income.
The earliest forms of social assistance were based on two conflicting principles, which both arose from Christianity. The first is that Christians have a duty to be charitable and care for the poor. The second is that such charity and care should not be so generous to allow people to not work, because "those who do not work shall not eat." Christianity cares about solving poverty, but it insists on doing so through getting people into employment and working. For much of social assistance's history, this has led to a rather cruel and authoritarian welfare state. For much of history from the 1500s on, social assistance was contingent with one's willingness to work, with the poor over thrown into work houses (the same ones considered cruel in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"), and those not willing to work being forced into hard labor. Society couldn't just give people a minimum income and not work, no, it has to be cruel, it has to be punitive, it has to try to pressure people to work, because idleness is the source of much evil in Christian mindsets. This mindset has been prevalent for much of modern society, and persists to this very day. While early public assistance was replaced with social insurance to some extent, it is still contingent on one's past labor contributions, so that the argument is framed that people "earned" these benefits. Society is still very much the idea of giving someone something for nothing.
I could almost, kind of sort of be sympathetic to the argument of pressuring people into work if it were based on some form of structural functionalism, the idea that if we did NOT do such a thing, society would fall apart as people would become lazy, never work, and lead to an overall collapse in productivity, with leads to scarcity, which leads to poverty and starvation. Putting aside the religious dogma associated with the idea of original sin, and crap like "those who don't work don't eat", I could find that convincing, if it were true.
As we know from studying basic income, it's not really true. Assuming a UBI is truly basic and set near the poverty level at least, and that the marginal tax rates associated with it are not completely crushing (<70% or so), we find that there is still plenty of incentive to work within a capitalist structure. Chandra Pasma's "Working Through the Work Disincentive" has actually looked into the 1970s studies in detail and found only a 13% labor reduction on average, which is more than sustainable in the grand scheme of things in my personal opinion. Many more modern studies seem to show much less work effort reduction, to the point that there is no statistically significant difference from traditional coercive social welfare. That said, I am hard pressed to truly view the idea of work reductions to be a problem in a modern context. Most arguments against UBI are based on a more normative, subjective ground, and that's really where I think my own talents and journey on this subject really qualify me to discuss this subject in detail.
The fact is, our society has this almost religious obsession with jobs. After reading this chapter of Van Parijs' book, I'm actually reminded it's not quite an almost religious obsession, it IS a religious obsession. The protestant work ethic is what underpins much of our modern approach to work, where we buy into the dogma of jobism, the idea that jobs are the solution to any and all social ills associated with capitalism. We don't talk about giving people money, except within the paradigm of either limited public assistance based on those christian principles, or social insurance, we talk about giving them jobs. All during the great recession, we had an obvious shortage of work while there being no real material shortages in the economy (if anything it seemed that things were just very poorly distributed because of our obsession with jobs and work), and rather than encouraging people to work less, we encouraged the creation of more jobs. Jobs jobs jobs, and more jobs. The solution to everything is jobs. It really is like this collective mental illness we have, that is borne out of literal religious dogma. Max Weber talked about this too. According to 8 bit philosophy, he saw capitalism as an iron cage which keeps people on a treadmill of working just to survive, and subjecting people to extreme levels of anxiety in order to keep going. To me, this leads to a rather hellish existence, which is a huge reason that I have come out so hard against this stuff.
With me, I'm a bit different. I have no religious faith in Christianity by this point, and in re-evaluating my worldview from a secular humanist perspective, and rethinking work and what it actually is, what its purpose is, and our pathological obsession with it, I've come to realize that yes, a lot of it does seem to go back to religious faith, as well as other things, and that as someone who drifts more toward nihilism and absurdism in my approach toward morality, preferring largely subjective and human made moral systems over objective "god given" ones, that I really don't identify with the concept of having a purpose and needing to work for my own good. And as I regained my spirituality somewhat through a more new age perspective, yeah, if I have any purpose at all, it's to challenge this crap.
So, I just don't identify with it, I dont identify with the underlying value systems, and I really just resent this stuff. I HATE the idea that we all spend our lives working like sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill. I hate this religious devotion to this idea of jobs and productivity and wish the concept would just die already.
Honestly, a criticism I get a lot of my views on this subject really does seem to come back to things like "well how do I handle the reciprocity objection" and other similar things. Well, I may have answered this before, but to put it simply, here's my honest to god opinion of the reciprocity objection. I do not feel like it is worth addressing directly. Because the reciprocity objection is based on an underlying moral system that has all of this religious nonsense in it. Keep in mind, if we start from a rather morally nihilistic perspective, all social structures are human made. There is no inherent morality behind them outside of whatever their functional purpose is, and most stuff comes down to peoples' collective preferences that they end up forcing upon everyone through the state. Property rights are subjective. Division of labor is subjective. And while there are arguably functional reasons behind these things that we should perhaps consider or take pause of, reciprocity is ultimately a normative argument based on a specific set of beliefs which evolved out of this christian work ethic. By addressing it directly, I acknowledge the validity of the underlying belief system and I limit myself by being forced to contort my own answer to fit that value system, which hobbles my ability to properly address it.
For me, the solution to the reciprocity objection is to largely ignore it. Because it IS a normative argument, and ideas like that only have as much power as we give them, and I refuse to give such an idea any power.
But, to put things another way, why should anyone who works give you money that you didn't work for? Shouldn't laborers be entitled to the full value of their labor? This is an interesting statement because it could be made either by an anti taxation right winger, or by a marxist arguing from a labor theory of value perspective. So, let me address that in my own way. When looking at the relationship between work and income, we need to recognize it for what it really is. A relationship based on structural functionalism. The reason we pay people to work is to incentivize them to work. If income wasn't to some extent tied to work, then people would not work unless coerced another way. I can acknowledge that fine. BUT, as we discussed above, a UBI and taxation associated with it would not dramatically threaten that relationship in itself and there will still be plenty of positive incentives to contribute to society. The reason I choose to remain within capitalism rather than support another system, like say socialism, is because socialism requires a reinventing of the wheel, while the incentive structure of capitalism does have positive aspects here. I just believe it needs to be adjusted a bit to be significantly less coercive. Assuming a UBI works, and work incentive remains intact, well, I really don't have a problem with redistribution.
"But", and you might say as you feel anger and outrage rising within you, "that just isn't fair! I worked for the money, I should be entitled to it!", well, let me again remind you that such an argument is normative. This is a subjective fairness argument. It is not a practical argument. And to interject my own normative system, I believe that reducing the sway of work over our lives is more important than one's sense of fairness in this situation. if anything, this idea that we must all work for a living and we must all work for ourselves with zero responsibility for another is the core source of most suffering under capitalism. We will never get away from work as a concept, we will never get away from full employment, and we will never solve poverty. Our ideas will continue to be dysfunctional like those generations of the past, and we will never truly solve the "work" problem. Solving the work problem and working less overall inevitably means at some point we're going to have to swallow our pride on the subject and acknowledge that moving in the right direction means future generations are not going to suffer as much as they did, and will not be subject to the same coercive forces that enslaved you in your own life. And if you cannot accept that mentally, because it causes so much anguish and invalidates your suffering in this life time, well, then we're going to have a problem. Because UBI activists have a term for this mindset. It's known as crab mentality. It's based on the idea of crabs in a bucket, and how any one crab trapped in a bucket could easily climb out of it, but the second one tries, the others try to drag it back down into the bucket so none of them can escape. If you are not letting people escape the idea that we need to work for a living, then you are one of those crabs in the bucket dragging everyone down.
Besides, to make another argument, under my system, everyone gets a UBI, so everyone can make the same choices. Sure, it is unfair to force some people to work so others can live off of the proceeds obligation free. Why should you suffer so others have it easy? The answer is that no one should suffer like that involuntarily. That's the point of UBI being unconditional. Conditional welfare breeds resentment as the working classes go on about how they work so hard while someone else gets something for free. Under a UBI, you ALL get something for free, and you ALL are free to make the same choices with your income. If you choose to work, while someone else chooses not to, you should not feel injured because you made a different choice than they did under roughly similar circumstances. The fact that you have more expensive tastes and feel a need to live in an area with a higher cost of living or a need to work for a higher standard of living is inherently your choice. if they managed to make it on a UBI near the poverty line, then that is their choice and they should not be begrudged just because you chose differently. If you still aren't convinced by that, then you are still likely holding on to some resentment of someone else getting something for nothing for whatever reason. Maybe you do adopt the religious ideology that everyone be forced to work under authoritarian means. Maybe you are still bitter and resentful, despite obviously choosing a different choice than someone else. Or maybe you're simply one of the 20-25% of people who would be made worse off on a UBI as their tax burden would exceed their UBI itself, in which case you are literally making more than anyone else in the country post UBI anyway, and I really have little sympathy here. The fact is, at some point, I just have to stop caring what you think and write you off as an acceptable loss. I have nothing else to say to you at this point. You just value different things than I do.
I view myself as a social libertarian. This is like being a social liberal or a social democrat, but with a more libertarian bend. And all of this UBI and anti work stuff is precisely what gives me that libertarian bend. I view public assistance as based on old school religious views that have more of a hint of authoritarianism wrapped up in religious dogma. Such people take a cruel and contradictory stance toward social assistance, feeling the need to take care of the poor, while also forcing them to work. And because for me, this idea that we are all coerced to work under capitalism is the core problem with it. If we resolved that, we would eliminate poverty, people would be freer to live as they please, and would be able to self actualize on their own terms. People would live happier, healthier lives, than they are under a society in which we are all forced to work because of these old religious ideas that really don't have much validity. In my world view, the true moral crisis of our society is that we are still stuck in these old ideas in which our main goal seems to be to force people into work, rather than taking care of their needs directly and letting them live as they choose. So for me, the solution to our modern economic ills isn't more jobs, it's guaranteeing peoples' basic needs and letting them be free to make their own decisions. Where society goes from there is up to it, and from there we can reevaluate things an focus on the next set of problems. Whereas traditional ideologies are going to have this authoritarian or paternalistic streak in them to try to modify or micromanage their behavior, I just want to give people access to their needs while otherwise minimizing the role of the government in their lives.
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