The issue of inequality now at the forefront of the political conversation may have been discovered only recently by the politicians, pundits and the 24-hour news cycle. But it’s been a hardy perennial for well over two centuries.
In 1776, against contemporaries who thought workers enjoying a rising standard of living would get slack and lazy, Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations:” “Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.”
And Thomas Paine, author of “Common Sense,” proposed about 20 years later a surprisingly sophisticated scheme for a guaranteed basic income — a proposal, he said “not adapted for any particular country alone: the principle on which it is based is general.”
By now everybody knows what the favored remedies are. The left offers increasing the minimum wage, more support for education, infrastructure and the “safety net,” much of its program paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy. The right urges lower taxes and regulation on everybody, especially the “job creators,” all resulting in government “small enough to drown in a bathtub.”
The left rejects government-drowning measures for having contributed to inequality in the first place. The right condemns the left’s initiatives as redistributive “class warfare.” And the beat goes on.
But while many on the right are just stoking their resentment with deep draughts of Ayn Rand, others have been engaged in serious policy analysis, the most sweeping redistributive schemes for moderating inequality coming, not from the alleged “socialist” President Obama, but from libertarians.
Nor is this anything new. Friedrich Hayek, one of the Austrian economists on whom free-market libertarians rely, supported a “minimum income for everyone,” and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman famously defended a negative income tax which was seriously considered by both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
I can hardly do justice to the libertarian position in a newspaper column. But the basic idea is that the entire “safety net” should be scrapped in favor of direct cash payments to everybody, the payments to be spent however the recipients wish.
Matthew Feeney reports in Reason magazine a Census Bureau estimate that “our total welfare spending is four times the amount that would be needed to lift all Americans currently living in poverty above the poverty line by giving them cash.”
To those who object that this bounty would fall on the deserving and undeserving alike, the libertarians argue that the current welfare system’s ham-fisted way of separating the sheep from the goats is exactly what’s brought us the bloated, intrusive, expensive government many complain about. If the price of the enlargement of personal freedom this income scheme would bring is subsidizing a few slackers here and there, the libertarians think it would be a price worth paying.
Moreover, small-scale experiments have shown that poor people don’t, on the whole, squander their cash payments on drink and drugs. On the contrary, in one such program in London, most of the recipients used their stipends to improve their lot in life.
One angle the “bleeding heart libertarians,” as they call themselves, don’t consider in this connection is that we may be moving toward an economy in which there’s diminishing demand for human labor anyway. In his recent discussion of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s new book, “The Second Machine Age,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who’s always looking around the next corner, notes their argument that the second machine age they think is already upon us relies “on fewer people and more technology.”
Among the measures Brynjolfsson and McAfee think we should consider as the “hurricane reshaping the workplace” forces us to rewrite the social contract is a guaranteed basic income for every American.
So our most urgent assignment may not be goading people into working, but supporting people the economy can’t absorb.
If that’s where we’re headed, the bleeding heart libertarian policy wonks may point the way forward.
• Leon Galis, a retiree living in Athens, is an occasional contributor to the Athens Banner-Herald editorial page. Send email to email@example.com.