I’d like to make a brief, freedom-based case for a universal basic income.
There is a habit on the right of equating market relations and right-wing politics more broadly with “freedom.” Whereas earlier conservatives like Edmund Burke (who defended tradition, authority, and hierarchy) would have recoiled at calls for unbridled freedom, in the 20th and 21st century figures on the right, from neoliberals like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Von Hayek, and James Buchanan, to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel, have couched their worldview in terms of a desire to expand “freedom.”
This is a powerful rhetorical move but it is ultimately a sleight of hand. Here I want to focus on the common claim that individuals are "free" to choose their workplace and "free" to leave if and when they want. This is a poor definition of freedom because of the following:
1) I must work to acquire the necessities of life. If I don't work I will become homeless, lack medical care, and potentially lack access to food and water. At its most basic, I can choose not to work on pain of death. This is essential to recognize, even if I am overstating it slightly. The point is, I have to work.
As political theorist C. Douglas Lummis said of the coercive nature of capitalism, “It is anti-democratic in that it requires kinds, conditions, and amounts of labor that people would never choose—and, historically, never have chosen—in a state of freedom.”
Lummis notes that historically economic coercion has taken many forms: it can involve taking away the common land and old means of livelihood from the poor (enclosure), forcing people to work (chattel slavery, indentured servitude, or political terror), or by making it necessary to work so as not to starve, be homeless, and in desperate poverty. It is of course this third form of coercion that defines work for many in contemporary capitalism.
2) I don't have much choice where I work. This is especially true for low-wage workers. If the choice is merely between several different low-paying, undignified, dictatorial workplaces, then I have no choice at all. Choosing whether to work at the McDonald’s or the Burger King down the road is hardly a meaningful choice. As participatory democrats have pointed out, there are few democratic workplaces, so in nearly every case I don't have the option of choosing to work in a democratic firm. Moreover, due to what economists call monopsony, in many locations, particularly small towns and rural areas, there are few employers. In these cases I literally have almost no choice, not even the choice between multiple low-wage jobs that those in more populous areas sometimes have (though this is not much of a choice, as noted above).
Frankly, this lack of choice is true even for many educated workers. The pay may be better but in many cases professional class workers don't really "choose" where to work. If one is lucky enough to possess a bachelor’s or postgraduate degree, they must send out dozens (or hundreds) of applications, cross their fingers, accept whichever job is offered out of that opaque process, and move to wherever it may be.
Obviously, there are few or no cases in the real world where people have unbounded freedom to choose between any and all possible options. So one might object by saying that I am attacking a straw man, since of course Friedman et al. aren’t arguing that capitalism gives workers total freedom. But this is not a straw man. First of all, the wealthiest individuals in the world come reasonably close to this genuine freedom of choice in occupation. Wealthy individuals can choose whether to work at all, and secondarily, they will have much more freedom than the rest of us in choosing where to work. But for everyone else, we have very limited choices, if any at all. Labor markets, and capitalism more broadly, do not offer the pinnacle of freedom that thinkers like Friedman seem to stress. Indeed, Michael Menser, summarizing a number of studies, estimates that 85% of all workers are in this coercive situation.
However, this problem is not insoluble. There is an answer for how to realize the free market vision of empowered workers freely choosing their workplaces: a universal basic income.
If there is a universal basic income, as well as universal medical care, child care, and some other universal public services, then I really am free in a much more robust sense. Concern 1) is addressed because I won't die or otherwise be severely lacking if don't work. I am then in a real sense free to say no to work, precisely because I have all my needs met via the basic income. This is the important point not addressed by those on the right. To be genuinely free in my choice of where to work I need to be free not to work. I need to be able to say “no.” When I have to take whatever job I can get because I need that income to pay for necessities, then by definition I can’t say “no.”
Concern 2) is also addressed in so far as I can now quit a bad or oppressive job without worrying about losing my benefits. In other words, the exit costs of quitting are lower. This will empower me to demand better work conditions because I can genuinely say “no.” One hopes that this would in turn increase the number of accountable, democratic workplaces because workers will have the leverage to demand better pay, conditions, hours, and more decision-making authority.
In current circumstances, as Elizabeth Anderson puts in in her book Private Government, “the exit costs of leaving a workplace are high.” But again, with a basic income and other universal social programs, those exit costs are reduced, if not altogether eliminated. Quitting becomes a genuine choice.
An additional benefit is that as social programs become universal they are no longer the private responsibility of a given firm and thus there will be no incentive for workplaces to save money by cutting benefits. Furthermore, if workers can say “no” this will tighten the labor market, putting pressure on employers to raise wages in order to draw and retain workers.
But ultimately the case here is a simple one: a universal basic income will expand the freedom of ordinary workers by letting them choose whether to work at all and giving them more power over the conditions and location of their work, should they choose to seek paid employment.
(For an alternative perspective, some Modern Monetary Theorists argue that we should seek a federal job guarantee rather than a universal basic income—see, for example, the work of Stephanie Kelton and William Mitchell & Thomas Fazi).