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Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Interesting Twitterscrum on Ideological Differences in Basic Income Guarantee Advocacy

Re-assembling a twitter stream with many participants and argumentative strands into a legible conversation seems to me to require a little chronological hanky-panky (since in real time people are jumping into and responding to points from earlier on or because finishing a point sometimes you lose track of the thrust of the conversation more generally and so on), but while straying from strict chronology can render a twitterscrum more intelligible it can also open one to suspicions of editorial embellishment and special pleading. I hope that none of the contributors to this conversation feel themselves to be misused or misrepresenated by this reconstruction. Comments, criticisms, questions, elaborations are all welcome as always.

2 comments:

Lorraine said...

The whole idea that minimum wage can or should be eliminated rests on marginalist assumptions such as the mythical "zero marginal productivity" worker. The freshwater economists and their allies who promote these concepts are overtly hostile toward wage-earning people of both high and low income levels and any income support programs whose parameters are acceptable to them should most certainly be regarded as Trojan Horses.

Dale Carrico said...

We share a suspicion of those who pretend indifference to the differences between basic income advocates of the left (who see it as part of a program for social justice, what I call equity-in-diversity) against those of the right (who see it as part of a program of "efficient" deregulation, privatization, and eventual precarization) and I strongly agree with your choice of the rhetoric of the "Trojan Horse." It's a tell when someone claims to want BIG not to supplement but to replace minimum wages. Coupling "basic" guaranteed income to demolition of standards guaranteeing equity -- this goes to for those who claim healthcare, education, legal representation and so on would no longer be a right for those "unworthies" who mis-manage their BIG so as to no longer have recourse to these privatized services -- ensures that "basic" income amounts to subsistence, which means that right-wing and market libertarian (who are also right-wing despite their incessant claims to be "beyond left and right") advocates of BIG are commandeering the emancipatory aspirations of left advoactes of BIG in the service of a re-establishment of feudalism. The same old story it is always is with them, and exactly what anyone would expect who wasn't distracted in the usual manner by the neoliberal/futurological shiny object of a new-fangled policy technofix.