Bruenig on workfare

Prior Models for Workable Workfare Work by Matt Bruenig

basic income, MLK Jr, Frances Fox Piven, James Tobin, John Kenneth Galbraith

The UBI Bait and Switch

Basic income: the world’s simplest plan to end poverty, explained

Surprising people! Arguably the biggest popularizer of the idea in the 20th century was libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who specifically favored a negative income tax as a replacement for much of the welfare state. Many left-of-center economists, like James Tobin and John Kenneth Galbraith, were also on board. More recently, Emmanuel Saez and Jonathan Gruber, two of the most influential left-leaning economists currently working, argued that an ideal tax system would feature a "large demogrant."

Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed the idea in his book Where to Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, writing, "I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income." Activists and scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven authored an influential article in The Nation in 1966 which called for a national movement of the poor with the intended goal of achieving a basic income. More academically, left philosophers and intellectuals like Erik Olin Wright, Peter Frase, Carole Pateman, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt and in particular Philippe Van Parijs have written in favor of the idea.

Kalecki

from Universal Basic Income is a neoliberal plot to make you poorer

Kalecki:

Writing in 1943, with the wartime policies of “full employment” enjoying wide support, Michal Kalecki wrote a remarkable essay entitled “The Political Aspects of Full Employment.” Kalecki opens by writing, “a solid majority of economists is now of the opinion that, even in a capitalist system, full employment may be secured by a government spending programme.” Though he is talking about full employment, which means an “adequate plan to employ all existing labour power,” the same is true of UBI. The majority of economists would agree that a plan to guarantee an income for all is possible. 

However, Kalecki ultimately argues that full employment policies will be abandoned: “The maintenance of full employment would cause social and political changes which would give a new impetus to the opposition of the business leaders. Indeed, under a regime of permanent full employment, ‘the sack’ would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow.”

J.W. Mason on the alternatives

At the Left Forum: What’s the Alternative to Neoliberalism?

(June 3, 2017)