So the Tories are cutting benefits for the poorest people struggling hardest to support the most modest lifestyles, yadda yadda tax breaks to billionaires, you know the score.
And one of the ideas Chancellor George Osborne has often used while attempting to rationalise policies which take more money away from low-income households than the richest, is that of “making work pay”.
The terrifying bogeyman he and other Tories like to conjure is that of the feckless scrounger, probably with a Northern accent, who lounges comfortably at home with their curtains drawn all day, living the high life on benefits which your taxes paid for, and who – because of the current, unjust welfare system – has no incentive to go out and work, when they can live just as cushy a life at home on benefits.
Now, leave aside for a moment that, statistically speaking, this character is so close to fictional as to make almost no difference to any of our country’s financial troubles; ignore briefly how laughable is the idea, to thousands of people who simply can’t find work, including many with disabilities or who’ve been forced into mandatory unpaid labour, that life on benefits is the “easy” choice; disregard, for the time being, the extent to which countless legitimately struggling individuals and families are cruelly stigmatised and marginalised by such characterisations as those favoured by the Conservative party.
Even without fighting any of those points, Osborne’s premise is wrong.
The Tory plan for welfare reform depends on people being bullied into doing a job, any job, no matter how low-paying or degrading, because there is no bearable alternative. They want to make life sufficiently uncomfortable, for those people they think aren’t trying hard enough, that they’ll all just jolly well try harder. Their worst nightmare is that people without savings or property or investments might somehow be comfortable in their lives, and not feel compelled by fear of starvation or homelessness to desperately look for work.
I hope my biased and provocative use of language is making it clear how I feel about this attitude. I really do.
Because aside from being heartless, it’s simply an incorrect view of humanity.
There’s this crazy wacky idea that some crazy wacky socialists seem keen on, called the guaranteed livable income. The basic proposition is to drastically simplify whatever system the country currently has in place to carefully and cautiously redistribute wealth, offering the most basic safety net it can to those who need it while making damn sure no scroungers come along and get a penny more than they deserve… and instead just give everyone enough money to live on.
No means testing. No penalties for not following the DWP’s instruction. You just all get enough money to live on. Guaranteed.
I told you it was crazy. No doubt the obvious problems and holes in this plan, and the many reasons we’re not already doing it, are clamouring to escape your furious fingers and make themselves heard in the nearest available comments section already. But it may astound you to know that the various economists and activists who’ve been investigating and exploring and testing out this idea for some decades have probably already considered many of the objections that sprung to your mind within around fifteen seconds. Whether or not they ultimately stand up, I’m not sure, but don’t be too quick to pat yourself on the back for utterly annihilating this whole worldview simply by having the blinding insight that giving money to people costs money.
Because, like I said, the Tories were wrong. A guaranteed livable income is about as far as you could possibly exaggerate their nightmare scenario. They’d have you believe that, in such a situation, the zombie feckless scrounger virus would spread inexorably across the land. Nobody would bother doing any work when they could just slob around picking up even more free money than they get now, with no risk of approbation or penalty. Without the threat of poverty to spur people into productivity, there’d be nobody actually making the money to hand out, and the whole system would collapse.
I wouldn’t put it past them to put it in similarly apocalyptic terms, too. But it’s a conclusion that depends on a cynical and inaccurate view of humanity. (The rest of humanity, anyway. Dave and George and the rest of that crowd could live comfortably without having to work another day in their lives, and would surely claim to do what they do out of a sense of duty and service, rather than being in it for the money. They just can’t imagine a similar altruism or public-spiritedness in anybody else.)
Only an unjustified contempt for other people can be the basis for thinking that they need to be threatened and browbeaten and punished into doing useful work; the relatively little amount of data that’s been allowed to exist indicates exactly the opposite.
I say “allowed to exist”, because it’s not hard to imagine the interest that governments might have in perpetuating the idea that a power structure needs to be maintained in society. In the case of the particular experiment with a guaranteed income described in that article, in Manitoba in the 1970s, the government withheld the data after the programme was scrapped, and wouldn’t let anyone gather further evidence which might have vindicated it.
What is known, though, from the data available, is that the Conservative nightmare singularly failed to come true. People didn’t just sit at home mooching off the state when there was free money to be had. In general, they kept working their jobs. There are reasons why people work beyond earning money to avoid poverty, after all. It can be rewarding, a way to socialise with people whose company one enjoys on projects one finds worthwhile. Particularly if you have the freedom to leave a work environment you don’t enjoy, and take the time to find someplace more suitable, without having to panic over paying the rent in the meantime.
And with that extra freedom, and without the stress and worry of paycheck-to-paycheck living, people were healthier. The resulting decrease in hospital visits, if similarly expanded over the whole of Canada, would save billions of dollars. And the only people who did drop out of work to live an easier life on free government money were new mothers – who spent more time with their babies – and teenagers – who graduated high school in improved numbers and had the chance to find jobs they might actually enjoy, and feel productive in, rather than whatever came along first which would allow them to pay the bills.
It’s a crazy idea. And the idea that something this crazy might actually work thrills me like little else. This right here is the shit I read about which gets me excited for a more awesome world and makes me want to share it with everyone in rambling blog posts with overly hurried endings because it’s late and I want to finish up and get it posted before I go to bed.
It might be a pipe dream. But I don’t think it has to be. And either way, it’s preferable to whatever heinous visions occupy the minds of our politicians as they sleep.
I don’t think it has to be either, James. :)
More and more people in the UK (and especially in other parts of Europe) are waking up to this idea, so you’re definitely not alone. Here are a couple of groups on Facebook you might be interested in:
Basic Income UK – https://www.facebook.com/groups/basic.income.uk/
Unconditional Basic Income for Europe – https://www.facebook.com/groups/basicincomeeurope/
yes James, there are many many people who are coming to the same conclusion.Its inevitable ;-) http://thebigpoliticalparty.wordpress.com/
The politicized nature of this post detracts from it.
“Notable libertarian-capitalist proponents of basic income guarantees include Milton Friedman (in the form of negative income tax),[42] Robert Anton Wilson,[43] Gary Johnson (In the form of the fair tax “prebate”) and Charles Murray.[44]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Advocacy_by_Right-libertarians
There are at least two ways to interpret what conservatives mean when they emphasize “incentives” in the context of employment, taxes, welfare, etc.. One interpretation ascribes to them a strong argument, and one a weak argument.
The weak argument is the one you have addressed squarely: that people will not work if they can be comfortably unemployed, so they should be pushed into the workforce by starvation, etc. However, by attacking merely that argument, you don’t employ the principle of charity and you risk having attacked a mere straw man if they mean something else.
The strong argument is that the state should avoid treating those doing desirable things worse than it treats those doing undesirable things. Here the desirable thing is participating in the economy and adding to the wealth of society. The argument is that whatever the value of the transfer payments to those who work is, the state should not give more than that to (identically situated people) who do not work.
My understanding of your argument relies on statements such as the following:
“What is known, though, from the data available, is that the Conservative nightmare singularly failed to come true. People didn’t just sit at home mooching off the state when there was free money to be had. In general, they kept working their jobs.”
The conservative nightmare is that if people get more money from the state when they don’t work than they get from their employers (plus the state) when they do work, *then* they will stay home. Not that unemployment should be disincentivized, but that employment should not be disincentivized.
This also explains the conservative focus on income tax rates as a factor weakening an economy, since those taxes disincentivize work (and, usually less directly, hiring) somewhat.
As a separate point, I saw a study showing that a very strong predictor of the amount of time a person was unemployed before finding a job after having been fired was unhappiness at being unemployed. This was after controlling for other variables: e.g., whether the person had savings, education, etc. Subjectively reported unhappiness was an even stronger predictor than subjectively reported desire to get a new job!
Of course, the correlation does not necessarily mean that the unhappiness caused the very unhappy people to get jobs sooner than the less unhappy. Even if the unhappiness were the cause, artificially increasing people’s unhappiness would not necessarily work because only intrinsically generated unhappiness might cause the more efficient job hunt. Even if it did work, deliberately increasing people’s unhappiness is generally very bad policy.
So, I did see evidence that indicated people can be browbeaten into doing more work than they would otherwise do. Possibly only if they themselves are doing the browbeating. ;-) I have that study saved somewhere …
Among the crazy wacky socialists are Herbert A. Simon, Friedrich Hayek, James Meade, Robert Solow, and Milton Friedman, winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics who fully support a basic income. I read somewhere that at least half of Nobel economists have supported the idea.