Degrowth

Well footnoted article, but the author doesn't adequately address the objections to a basic income.

Laborist social democrats argue that each person should contribute socially necessary labor time.

This is either a mischaracterization of anti-capitalist arguments, or the author hasn't fully researched the position. Since there's no footnotes, I suspect it is a constructed straw-man.

Here's an exerpt from a fleshed out objection from Alyssa Battistoni:

Given that, why do bosses—at least the ones in Silicon Valley—seem to like UBI so much? Some of their enthusiasm may simply be well-meaning naiveté: as Sam Altman of Y Combinator says, “50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people”—as if this hasn’t been one of the defining features of capitalism all along. Presumably freedom from the need to earn a living will unleash people’s entrepreneurial spirit, their inner innovator—rather than simply give us the chance to fish, hunt, and criticize just as we please. The view of UBI as the foundation of the gig economy, meanwhile, is a tacit acknowledgement that capitalism can’t pay its full costs—a transfer of responsibility for a living wage from private employers to the public. Then there’s an even worse case for UBI as pressure outlet: Stern argues that basic income supporters would do well to convince the anxious rich that it’s their best bet to avoid “the guillotine” amidst growing inequality and desperation.

But you don’t need to be Robespierre to be suspicious of a proposal that explicitly announces its intent to protect the rich from working-class rage—particularly when one of the major questions of UBI is where the free money will come from. Stern cautions UBI supporters against advocating a “soak the rich” tax on political grounds: the broad coalition that UBI requires will be impossible if the rich are against it from the start. (Alas, this is already the metric for most policies.) Instead, he proposes to fund UBI by cashing out major welfare programs (food stamps, housing assistance, the earned income tax credit) and charging a value-added tax on consumer goods; more tentatively, he considers a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax, and cuts to military spending. But funding a basic income by cannibalizing existing welfare programs and imposing regressive consumption taxes perversely places the burden of subsidizing low wages on the poor and working-class people making them in the first place.

That this is a proposal put forth by a former labor leader is a measure of the left’s weakness. And indeed, Stern’s view of labor’s political prospects is remarkably dim. In fact, UBI is explicitly posed as a solution to the problem of declining union power: “It was time for me to look beyond unions for answers,” Stern declares in the first thirty pages. Instead, he proposes a Basic Income Party that could run candidates in every Congressional district and threaten a tax strike—the weapon of the wealthy—until Congress agrees to vote on a basic income package. It’s obviously a non-starter. But it reveals the limits of Stern-style unionism: start out collaborating with Walmart on healthcare, and soon you’ll hope only for the dwindling state to throw a few bucks at the reserve army of Uber drivers tasked with ferrying the rich from one gentrified enclave to the next. Instead of fighting off the dystopian future, settle into the interregnum of the present, with all its morbid symptoms. But as the writer Ben Tarnoff has pointed out, the places where technological development hasn’t produced a dystopian, jobless future (like Sweden) don’t just have technology, they also have strong unions and a robust welfare state. The kind of starkly unequal society that Stern and other UBI futurists fear wouldn’t just come about because the robots arrived—it would come about because only a few people owned them.