Résultats de recherche pour « Universal Basic Income »

Abstract Illiberal regimes increasingly rely on “soft repression” that weaponizes economic precarity while preserving a veneer of legality. This article develops a theoretical framework demonstrating how Universal Basic Income (UBI) alters the strategic interaction between citizens and the state. By guaranteeing survival independent of political compliance, UBI lowers the personal cost of moderate dissent, functions as a universal “strike fund” facilitating collective action, and solves coordination problems by reducing the fear of exemplary punishment in moderate dissent. More importantly, UBI raises the threshold for repression. By neutralizing cheap and deniable economic coercion, it forces illiberal regimes either to tolerate higher levels of dissent or to escalate to more visible and costlier forms of “hard” repression. The article concludes that UBI should be understood as more than a social policy. It is a political institution that fortifies the material conditions necessary for exercising civil liberties under stress.

Abstract “Functional finance” is an economic theory within the Post Keynesian school of thought. Especially in the form of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it has begun to have two big but opposite effects on the debate over Universal Basic Income (UBI). Some people state MMT in an exaggerated way that implies the government can spend all it wants on UBI or anything else without ever raising taxes or borrowing money as if government spending had no limits of any kind. Other people refer to MMT while arguing that any effort to maintain a livable level of UBI is unsustainable. This article discusses the functional finance implications for the cost and sustainability of UBI, arguing that neither of those exaggerated implications are correct. MMT doesn’t free us for the concern for how to support UBI with taxes, but neither does it give reason to believe UBI is any less sustainable.

Abstract John Maynard Keynes has not normally been seen as a basic income supporter, but two letters written by Keynes during the Second World War suggest that he had thought seriously about the idea and was attracted to the principle. Basic income fitted well with Keynes’ liberal values and his long-range optimism about economic possibilities. In the short term, however, Keynes believed it would be a mistake to put the idea on the political agenda before the time was ripe.