Guaranteed minimum income debate
The idea of a guaranteed income has a long history in political and economic thought. It has three historical roots: the idea of a minimum income first appeared at the beginning of the 16th century (Thomas More, Johanes Ludovicus Vives) the idea of an unconditional one off grant first appeared at the end of the 18th century (Thomas Jefferson, Marquis de Condorcet, Thomas Paine) and the two were combines for the first time to form the idea of an unconditional basic income near the middle of 19th century (Abraham Lincoln, Henry George, Edward Bellamy) In the 1930's (amidst the Great Depression) Francis Townsend proposed government payments of $200 each month to everyone aged 60 or older. The Old Age Revolving Pension combined liberal financial retirement for the aged with national recovery and permanent prosperity. Recovery and prosperity were to be achieved by requiring recipients to quit any paid work and to spend all of the money each month, thereby creating jobs for younger workers. To raise the money, he proposed a 2 percent sales tax on all business transactions. Roughly 2.2 million people joined Townsend Clubs, and that popular movement played a key role in lobbying for Social Security. A national movement Share Our Wealth was launched in 1934, demanding a guaranteed income of $5,000 a year for every family. There were clubs in every state, and in 1935 they claimed to have 7.7 million members. Huey Long, who founded it, proposed to raise the money through substantial taxes on the very rich. Social credit is an interdisciplinary philosophy developed by C. H. Douglas, a British engineer, who wrote a book by that name in 1924. It encompasses the fields of economics, political science, history, accounting, and physics. Social credit would give absolute economic security for the individual. On January 11, 1944 in his annual Message to Congress Franklin Roosevelt stated that the true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of jobs are the stuff of which dictatorships are made, he said. So a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. In his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek endorsed the idea of providing people the security of a minimum income. He wrote that there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. And this is no privilege but a legitimate object of desire that can be provided for all outside of and supplementary to the market system. Peter Drucker proposed a predictable income plan in The New Society, published in 1949 and reissued in 1962 and 1993. Predictable income would banish the uncertainty, the dread of the unknown and the deep feelings of insecurity under which the worker today lives. The guaranteed income he sought was to be minimal and variable as economic conditions change. He rejected the ideas of trying to guarantee jobs or wages. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman considered methods to help the poor and concluded that the arrangement that recommends itself on purely mechanical grounds is a negative income tax. The advantage of this arrangement is that it is directed specifically at the problem of poverty. It gives help in the form of cash. It is general and could be substituted for the host of special measures now in effect. It makes explicit the cost borne by society. It operates outside the market. In his 1980 book, Free to Choose, Friedman wrote that we should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash a negative income tax. In his 1963 book, Free Men and Free Markets, Robert Theobald wrote that it is the economy growing fast enough to provide jobs for all that keep us living within "a whirling dervish" economy dependent on compulsive consumption. This book proposes the establishment of new principles specifically designed to break the link between jobs and income. The principle of an economic floor under each individual must be established. This principle would apply equally to Guaranteed minimum income debate