Freedom and Democratization: Why Basic Income is to be Preferred to Basic Capital

Abstract

Despite the popularity of democracy in the 1990s, relatively little attention has been paid in recent academic debates to the democratic significance of a basic income. The focus is usually on such questions as social justice, relief of poverty, equality of opportunity, promotion of flexible labour markets, and individual freedom. I am not suggesting that these questions are unimportant or unrelated to democracy. Rather, this approach reflects the extent to which recent political philosophy tends to put democracy in a separate compartment, or merely takes for granted a democratic background in order to analyse social justice and other questions. Two other aspects of contemporary scholarship on stakeholding also work in the same direction. First, the insights available from three decades of feminist scholarship have been neglected, even though they bear directly on some central questions about basic income, basic capital, and democracy. Argument is often contained within some narrow parameters set by controversies about, for example, liberalism and communitarianism. Second, the theoretical framework adopted is frequently drawn from neo-classical economics.

I have been interested in basic income for some years, but have only now begun to write about it. I wish to thank Manchester University for a Hallsworth Fellowship that gave me three months to read in 1997, and especially David Purdy for sharing his manuscript and for our conversations. Thanks also to Jurgen de Wispelaere, and participants at two seminars at the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU in the fall of 2000.