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.)
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...
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.