buybuydandavis comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - LessWrong

13 Post author: ChrisHallquist 27 November 2013 05:08AM

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Comment author: buybuydandavis 24 November 2013 02:53:39AM *  0 points [-]

originated with Renaissance liberals and humanists

As far as I know, the originator of the basic principle was Thomas Paine, though he also went for a lump sum payment on the age of majority as well. By US terminology today, he'd be a libertarian.

I don't see anyone listed prior to Paine on the link given, and would be interested if you had a precursor to Paine.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 24 November 2013 07:07:22PM -1 points [-]

Right-libertarians certainly claim Paine, but his Agrarian Justice proposal is strictly redistributionist — taxing inheritances and land ownership to fund pensions, a move specifically targeted at aiding the dispossessed at the expense of the wealthy. Moreover, he considered this obligatory, and not merely a charity or a political compromise. There is a whiff of Georgism or Geolibertarianism about Paine, and he is certainly no anarcho-capitalist. But he's in that quadrant.

(Although by U.S. terminology today, anyone associated with the French Revolution would be a terrorist, sadly.)

That said, the notion of basic income is found in More's Utopia as an alternative to killing thieves who steal because they are poor. In early examples it's difficult to distinguish basic-income proposals from make-work proposals, though, in part because of the notion that idleness was a social ill. (Which is distinct from the right-libertarian notion that people do not deserve sustenance if they don't work on projects the market demands.)

Comment author: buybuydandavis 24 November 2013 07:57:26PM *  1 point [-]

but his Agrarian Justice proposal is strictly redistributionist

Minimally. The funds for widows and orphans would be. Old age pensions could either be seen as redistribution or forced retirement plans from funds owed. Paine considered payments obligatory because they were based in justice, compensation from the land possessors to the non land possessors for their exclusive use and control of "their" property. It's land title that is redistributionist.

I don't consider More's basic income the same as Paine's. Paine's was a just compensation to a free citizen - More's was the feeding and watering of citizen livestock subject to forced labor. Might as well say that a pack mule gets a basic income. They did at least agree on the inherent injustice of property in land, though I don't think More made the connection between that injustice and a basic income as compensation.

Which is distinct from the right-libertarian notion that people do not deserve sustenance if they don't work on projects the market demands.

To understand right libertarian thought, you first must see how they distinguish between what you deserve and what you have a right to (which I argue is crucial to a non theocratic state). No one deserves cancer, but that doesn't give one a right to rob one's neighbors to pay for treatment. For right libertarians, you earn what you get in free exchange with others, and they object to having those earnings confiscated by force.