Georgetown University From the SelectedWorks of Karl Widerquist 2013 Freedom as the Power to Say No: Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income Karl Widerquist Available at: https://works.bepress.com/widerquist/90/ 1 Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No Karl Widerquist This is an early version of a prologue that was later published as: Karl Widerquist, March 2013. Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, “Prologue,” pp. 1-8 Please cite the published version. Abstract The most difficult thing for a society to do is to avoid oppressing its most disadvantaged people. Yet many prominent theories of justice based on social contract or natural rights stress disadvantaged people’s responsibilities to the wider society as much or more than they stress society’s responsibility to them. This book begins an attempt to rectify that problem with a new theory of Freedom. The word, freedom, is commonly understood in two different ways: the absence of restriction, impediment, or interference (what I call scalar freedom) and the absence of slavery, detention, or oppression (what I call status or categorical freedom). This book argues that philosophers have focused too much on scalar freedom and proposes a theory of status freedom as “effective control self-ownership”—most simply, freedom as the power to say no. This book argues for and explores the implications of this theory of freedom. It shows that most societies today put the poor in situations in which they lack this crucial freedom, making them vulnerable to poverty, exploitation, and injustice despite other policies in place to help them. People who have no other option but to work for someone else to meet their basic needs are effectively forced laborers and are fundamentally unfree. The book argues that the basic income guarantee is an appropriate institution to help secure status freedom in a modern industrial society. 1 Table of Contents Prologue: The Big Casino 1. Introduction 2. Effective Control Self-Ownership: Freedom as the Power to Say No 3. Forty Acres and a Mule? Implications of Respecting Personal Independence 4. The Importance of Independence I: Framing the Issue 5. The Importance of Independence II: Freedom and Integrity 6. The Importance of Independence III: Market Vulnerability 7. What Good is a Theory of Freedom That Allows Forced Labor? Independence and Modern Theories of Freedom 8. If You’re an Egalitarian, Why Do You Want to Be the Boss of the Poor? Independence and Liberal-Egalitarian Theories of Justice 9. On Duty 10. Conclusion Preface and Acknowledgements I don’t know exactly when I began thinking about the ideas that made their way into this book. The general philosophical outlook is something that has been bouncing around in my head for some time. The outlook didn’t appear as a whole at any one point; it gradually developed. My interest in social justice began when I was a kid. My parents were politically interested, liberal Christians (a rarity these days). They, my brother, my sister, and I regularly discussed politics around the dinner table. Growing up in that context in the 1970s, I was optimistic about the progress the United States had made against racism, and I began to believe that the biggest remaining problem in most democratic countries is the horrible way we treat the poor. The television series, Free to Choose, by Milton Friedman, first introduced me to the 3 idea of a guaranteed income, which is now more commonly known as a basic income guarantee. He presented it mostly as a way to simplify the welfare system, but thinking about it over the years, I began to see it as the centerpiece of a just society and a serious challenge to the left: If we really care about other people in society, we should care about them unconditionally. The effort that has so far resulted in this book is a self-exploration of why I think this perspective is so important. As I see it, from the hanging gardens of Babylon to the modern sweatshop, one social problem occurs over and over again in different ways: advantaged people force disadvantaged people to serve them. I find the social contract answer extremely dissatisfying: it’s OK to force people to do things as long as you can imagine conditions under which they would have signed a contract subjecting themselves to force. For a time I thought I was a libertarian, but I eventually came to see the rightlibertarians, who call themselves “libertarians” in the United States, in a similar light as social contract theorists. They talk about freedom from force, but they invite everyone to ignore the tremendous amount of freedom-threatening force involved in the establishment and maintenance of property rights to the Earth and all its products. Without rectifying this issue, “libertarianism” becomes the defense of privilege at the expense of liberty. Although these issues were important to me, I didn’t do much direct work on social justice until the mid-1990s, when I taught several semesters of “the History of Economic Thought” at New York University while working on a Ph.D. in economics at the City University of New York. Some ideas from in-class discussions with students have probably made their way into this book. Also in the mid-90s, Michael Lewis, Pam Donovan, and I decided to have weekly breakfasts to talk about the progress we were making on our theses. These discussions usually turned to politics, 3 and one day we found the one thing we could all agree on was an unconditional basic income guarantee. So, Michael Lewis and I wrote a paper on it, which was eventually published (about ten years later and in revised form) as “An Efficiency Argument for the Basic Income Guarantee,” in International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment. One paper on the basic income guarantee led to another, as well as to involvement with the Basic Income Earth Network and to writing the Newsletter for the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network. I read a lot of impressive literature on basic income, but none of it quite seemed to articulate the reasons I thought it was so important. So, I had to explore my ideas more. In 2001, I was held a half-year fellowship at the Chaire Hoover at the Catholic University of Lovain in Belgium where Philippe Van Parijs was an influential mentor. By this time I realized that my interest in economics was secondary to my interest in social justice, and I decided that the best way to work fulltime on social justice was to go back to graduate school and get a doctorate in political theory. Getting a second doctorate still feels like a crazy idea, but in hindsight, it was the right thing for me. I started at Oxford in October of 2002, and by April of 2006, I completed a thesis entitled, Property and the Power to Say No: A Freedom-Based Argument for Basic Income. Many of the ideas in this book appeared first in that thesis—often in a slightly different form. My supervisor, Stuart White, gave me extremely helpful feedback on several versions of each chapter. Other faculty also gave me useful help and encouragement, including Dan McDermott (my substitute supervisor), Adam Swift and David Miller (my “transfer-of-status” examiners), Gerald A. Cohen (my internal thesis examiner) and Michael Otsuka (my external thesis examiner). 5 Some of the most valuable help I received was from discussing writings and ideas with my fellow graduate students at Oxford, both while we were students and since we left. These include Ayelet Banai, Ben Saunders, Christian Schemmel, Clare Heyward, John Filling, Katherine Eddy, Kieran Oberman, Miriam Ronzoni, Olly Dowlen, Omar Khan, Peter Balint, Rob Jubb, Sara Ababneh, Sarah Fine, Shlomi Segal, Steve Winter, Teun Dekker, Tiziana Torresi, and others. Other friends and colleagues have been helpful including Almaz Zelleke, Angela Cummine, Carole Pateman, Chris Brooke, Daniel Butt, David Casassas, Drew Chastain, Eri Noguchi, Gijs van Donselaar, Jason Berntsen, Jason Burke Murphy, Jeremy Koons, José Noguera, Julia Maskivker, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Marc-Andre Pigeon, Michael Howard, Michael Lewis, Nir Eyal, Pascal Couillard (who coined the term passive contribution), Paul Schumacher, Richard Caputo, Stephen Nathanson, Yannick Vanderborght, and many others. I have discussed these ideas with so many friends and colleagues that I can’t possibly name everyone who has influenced this book, and so I know when this comes out I’m going to owe apologies to several people. If I’ve discussed politics or philosophy with you in my lifetime, you might have influenced this book in some way. So, thanks. I received useful comments from participants at more conferences and seminars than I can name in Europe, North America, the Middle East, South Africa, and South America. For the most part, I don’t remember the name with the comment. But I do remember Peter Vallentyne asked a question that made me revise my definition of status freedom; Erik Olin Wright asked a question that made me reformulate a criticism of Nozick; and John Baker asked a question that made me realize I had to clarify all kinds of things about the relationship between this theory, liberal-egalitarianism, and the argument for a social responsibility to work. 5 I published four chapters of my thesis in the following journals: Public Reason, Human Rights Review, Political Studies, and Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Although text from only one of these articles (the one in Human Rights Review) has made it into this book, anonymous referee comments from these (and other) journals made me think further about what this project ought to be.