One of my favorite liberal policies is the basic income proposal. The idea is that all citizens have a basic guaranteed income, below which no one may fall. As the argument goes, this supplies more flexibility than basic provision of essential services, and renders recipients much more autonomous than they currently are, since the government tends to spend redistributed money on the things it values the most, rather than the things that the poor value the most. There’s also a fairly easy way to run such a program: instead of making the basic income available only to the poor, you can make it a citizenship grant available to everyone who files tax returns, like social security. This radically simplifies the administration and eliminates the wasteful need to inquire into the deservingness of the recipients. If you’re a citizen, you get a check. Alaska has a system like this for all residents.
As I wrote recently, the dark side of the basic income proposal is that it privileges citizens over non-citizens. Perhaps this dark side is mitigated a bit if every nation-state in the world enacts a basic income, but there’d still be horrible inequalities between nations. However, in this post I want to argue that this kind of inequality is better than the status quo: “second-best” ideal theorizing… with a dash of public choice caution for good measure. Continue reading Does Basic Income + VAT “Solve” Immigration?
