So, i'm still reading "A Radical Proposal for a Free and a Sane Society" and a lot of it resonates, and I have a lot to say about it, that might go into the premise of where my head is at lately with the idea of going into my own book on UBI. In the chapter, I just read, he went into the history of the subject.
And of course, the first forms of UBI were ironically based on Christianity. That's common in western society. A lot of our old ideals actually do seem to trace themselves back to Christianity in some form or another. But in this sense, the first UBI type proposals seemed almost, georgist in nature. In other words the principles george used to argue for his ideology seem explicitly based on this Christian worldview.
In particular, a lot of early advocates like Thomas paine argued for an unconditional income drawn from land rents. Basically, the God made the earth so no one is entitled to profit from the earth, but because we're all called to labor...well....you gotta work. But hey, here's an unconditional income drawn from land rents.
And this...is actually why i tend to dislike georgism. It still has this right libertarian labor fixation and people being entitled to the product of their labor in an ideologically dogmatic way (whereas I support the principle from a perspective of pragmatism and incentives to work, and am, as a result a lot more flexible in the implementation of this idea), but it does actually cede that the land belongs to no one. But then ownership of land seems to be demonized in itself where instead of people being taxed based on their ability to pay, which is, IMO a lot less freedom reducing, they tax based on ownership of land. So a business that isnt very land intensive and maybe owns one corporate office in Delaware somewhere barely pays any taxes, but they're coming for the old people on social security or UBI who happen to own their own home and dare to want to live in it. Generally speaking, a UBI on these principles just doesnt have good results, it doesnt tax people who are wealthy enough to bear the tax, but it does tax people based on their ownership of a fixed resource, even if their ownership isn't excessive and for personal use. Dont get me wrong, I can kind of sort of get behind georgist principles in terms of actually attempting to profit off of land, ie, renting out property for profit, or alternatively buying up homes to "house flip" and sell them for a profit. Or even just, hogging land ownership by using far in excess of what can be defined as one's "fair share". I mean those guys you can tax, but many proponents of these kinds of ideas are a bit too ideological and indiscriminate in their ideology. One thing I notice about my own approach to politics is that while I have my own ideology, I also tend to be far more practical where instead of getting stuck in my own head about right and wrong regardless for how it actually affects people, I actually tend to focus on the consequences. I can, in theory, get behind georgist ideas, but in terms of putting UBI or social libertarian ideas into practice, I ultimately am a policy nerd who focuses more on HOW to actually get the results I actually want. I really don't know how to reconcile this with my philosophy at this time, although if I develop this idea further for some sort of book, it might be worth trying to put it into words.
Anyway, then as time went on, UBI started actually taking quite a bit of an "indepentarian", or what could be later defined as "indepentarian." At the time, it was called "Fourierism". Basically this ideology recognizes that the property rights system is oppressive and that it robs people of their liberty and forces people to work for others in order to survive, and that a UBI is needed to free people from it. To deal with the "but no one would work" objection, they responded, much like I would, that people would instead work for "pocket money" and would work for higher standards of living, and that if people chose not to work at all, they'd just get the bare minimum.
These kinds of ideas were ironically pushed in opposition of socialism, and proponents were people like John Stuart Mill (an early influence of my current views), and Charles Fourier, who the idea is named after.I find this interesting given how much socialists seem to have a work fetish and how I have opposition with them today because of it. I mean, for all of the good observations they sometimes make about work in a modern capitalist context, they literally can't seem to get away from the idea that people be forced to work for their subsistence, holding similar ideas to the fundamentalist christians whom I despise and who my own worldview was made out of opposition of.
While I'm familiar with much of the American debates about UBI in the 1960s and 1970s and how work fetishization won out over progress, thus leading to the modern set of problems I now rail against in my own views, I was not as aware that the British debated it after WWI in a serious way, with people like Bertrand Russell supporting the idea. Sadly, it seems that the more traditional forms of welfare won out, in the form of the Beverridge system that later became the model for the UK and as we know from the Nordic Theory of everything, much of Scandinavia too.
As I said, and should be widely known on this blog, the US discussed the idea in the 1960s between Nixon and McGovern, but it basically lost out because there was opposition across the political spectrum for various reasons, and people just can't seem to get over this weird freaking idea that work has such much dignity that you should be forced to do it under the threat of starvation.
And of course, the issue has been discussed in Europe in decades since, but obviously, the modern social democratic left and their obsession with work and labor opposes the idea because once again, they can't get over the labor fetish.
Honestly, it's really frustrating seeing the left act in such a way. I know a lot of left wing ideas in the past criticizing capitalism are what led to the rise of many of the schools of thought discussed here. Particularly more anarchist ideas than socialist. But because modern liberalism is dominated by reciprocity, leftism seems to dogmatically virtue signal the value to work as much as your typical biblical literalist, these ideas have always been a minority, and always end up just popping up every few decades, only to die out as another more "jobist" status quo reaches a dominant position instead. I used to see reaganism and the biblical literalism attached to it as the problem, but I now know the problem with the protestant work ethic is a lot more pervasive in modern western culture and that both liberals and leftists are just as bad with it in their own ways. And that's kind of why I feel like a freaking alien politically these days, and I end up having to take shots all up and down the spectrum, from the far right to the far left to everything in between. While on a traditional political spectrum I am closer to a social democrat, I would consider myself a social libertarian on the basis that I really dont have these authoritarian jobist tendencies and would like to see a "libertarian form of social democracy" that brings "real freedom for all" as Van parijs would say, or "the right to say no" as Widerquist would say. Social libertarianism truly is unique from these other schools of thought, and while there are similarities there are obvious differences too. And I feel like I'm in a free for all against all of them when discussing politics online or alternatively in person.
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