ECONOMIES EXIST TO CREATE WEALTH...:

REVIEW: of Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income: by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas (Ryne Clos, 8/11/23, Spectrium Culture)

What Jäger and Zamora Vargas are able to show is that UBI could unite disparate thinkers on opposite ends of the political spectrum. For arch-conservative neoliberal economists, it was a way for the state to deal with poverty without stepping on the throats of heroic job-creating capitalists; to reprise one of the book's chapter titles, it could provide welfare without a welfare state. On the other hand, for left-wing (and often anticapitalist) thinkers and activists, UBI could free repressed groups from the paternalistic and normative reach of the state. The New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society policy programs did provide assistance to just about everyone in the United States, but they did so in a highly prescribed way that demanded conformity and assumed a specific way of life (namely, a nuclear family with a home and a single male breadwinner). For both sets of thinkers, then, UBI became a way to escape what they saw as an overly large, overbearing and oppressive state apparatus without abandoning the demand that that state had a duty to care for its people.

...political systems exist to determine how it is distributed.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2023 7:31 AM

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