A Citizens' Income

Over the centuries a citizens' income has been regarded variously as, for instance, a credit due for the appropriation of originally commonly owned natural resources, or as an entitlement originating in today's superior productivity with respect to subsistence. A basic income, regardless of personal circumstances, by virtue of citizenship, is a fine objective. It is so expensive only the unreasonable would not reply instantly, 'How is it to be done'.

James Meade, in his Agathotopia (a good place, rather than utopia which is nowhere) advocated the replacement of wages by a participatory income, a share of enterprise value added. This gave workers higher and more secure employment, but more uncertain earnings - hence the need for a citizens' income. A citizens' income would be funded either from income from state assets - if and when the state had managed to transform the national debt into net state assets, or through a sequence of government budget surpluses, or via progressive taxation (plus taxes on pollution, as well as on advertising which he regarded as a form of pollution).

Milton Friedman regarded a citizens' income as an enhancement of individual choice, a substitute for paternalistically chosen benefits in kind. It is interesting to consider that post-socialist transition countries could have used public capital to fund such an income, instead of dilapidating it through mass privatisation.

A citizen's income for Silvio Berlusconi or Bill Gates is a small price to pay for the ending of means tested, state paternalism. And charitable giving by recipients who felt in no current need would be better than any allocations determined by the ideology of the authoritarian state.