The Gateway Chronicle 2020

70
However, he seems to be more of an advocate
of ‘participation income’, where one
has to do some socially beneficent tasks in
order to receive an income from the State.
As such, early humanists, such as More,
began the dialogue on a wider entity
providing for everyone. Highlighting the
plight of the
poorest is
something
that has not
been lost on
modern UBI
advocates
and they
promote the
idea, in part,
as it could
may reduce
crime rates
as it stands
as a positive
impetus for
those in the
bottom deciles
of society.
Jean Luis Vives was an early proponent of UBI
Revolutions
in the eve of
the 18th century brought further discourse
on basic income. French thinkers such as
Montesquieu, Babeuf, Condorcet and
Robespierre all, in some form contributed
to the argument for UBI. While they all
made important additions, Thomas Paine
was instrumental in bringing the light to
the idea and stressing basic income as a
right more than just a
useful policy in socio-economic
terms. In both
Rights of Man and Agrarian
Justice, Paine extensively
laid out plans and
for basic income. A common
objection to the idea
is that UBI would be
given to both the Hedge
fund manager and the unemployed single
mother. Paine, as well as modern day proponents,
argue that this should be the case
for numerous reasons, and he specifically
wanted to ‘prevent invidious distinctions’
that would be involved with means-testing.
For his work, Paine is often seen as
the father of basic income. Unfortunately
for Paine, he was living at a time where
these ideas of such radical redistribution
were extremely unlikely to be accepted by
the ruling classes. This does not eradicate
the contributions that Paine made and his
work on the justification on the basis of
rights rather than purely practical needs,
is still cited often today. Some of these
rights-based reasoning re-emerged decades
later with Charles Fourier (1772-
1837) claiming that the violation of every
person’s right to hunt, fish and farm on
common land meant that civilisation
owed a subsistence level of income to
those unable to their own needs, a belief
echoed by Joseph Charlier (1816-96).
While the latter and his ‘dividende teritorial’
was quickly forgotten, the very much
unforgotten J.S Mill picked up on Fourier’s
ideas. Mill appreciated the fact Fourier
did not suggest abolishing private
property or inheritance and that his system
of basic income (begrudgingly) accommodated
these key aspects to liberal
society.
After the first World War, Philosopher
and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell
(1870-1972) believed that basic income
could marry the advantages of anarchism
and of socialism. Russell fused the appeal
of anarchism in terms of the sheer liberty
it bestows to individuals with socialism’s
‘inducement
to
work’. In
this sense,
basic income
could be
implemented
in
order to
allow people the free choice to not work,
living with the subsistence income and ensure
there was a system to allow those
“Revolutions in the eve of the 18 th
century brought further discourse on
basic income”