Basic income sustains neoliberalism. Contemporary global development context creates devils deals in implementation

Devil’s Deals and World Time in Development Te notion of World Time refers to a shared global framework for debate across even very structurally dissimilar countries. One of the uses of the concept is in pinpointing the prevalence of certain policy paradigms and programmes of structural change in the face of divergence. Te contemporary World Time of deregulation, rising inequality, and public austerity generates the context for devils’ deals in the context of global Basic Income debate. A changed global development context pushes Basic Income discourse towards accommodation, including by making Basic Income common cause with a portrayal of neo-liberal reform as a response to—and resolution of— inadequacies within post-war welfare provision.

i. Neo-liberalisation Friedman’s advocacy of the Negative Income Tax was tied to his association of economic and political freedom with breaking down the state in favour of the market. Neo-liberalisation of the Basic Income debate can refer in this context to the reduction of ideas of personal control to the basic linear premise of Friedman’s argument (Friedman 1962, 1970, 1990). Neo-liberalisation is a devil’s deal because it distorts perception of the wider conditions for reform in the direction of Basic Income.

Neo-liberalisation of Basic Income debate also refers to a general outcome in which Basic Income debate supports neo-liberal development reforms in discourse or practice, intentionally or unintentionally. A relevant example is the instrumentalisation of classic arguments for Basic Income in the defence of neoliberal globalisation. According to Ravallion, Basic Income ‘has a strong appeal in allowing guaranteed protection from poverty, while retaining the economic advantages of an open and competitive market economy’. Quoting van Parijs’ left libertarian case for Basic Income, Ravallion (2017: 19) associates the introduction of Basic Income with ‘replacing the existing unemployment benefts and other allowances’, doing so quoting van Parijs’ left libertarian case. According to Ravallion (2017: 19), ‘Van Parijs (1992) …argues for “Basic Income capitalism,” which combines private ownership of the means of production and free markets with a Basic Income for all’. Arguably, Ravallion’s take here is fairly general, but it is noteworthy that Basic Income is invoked—as in this case—in an argument against mainstream critics of inequality (for instance, Bourguignon 2017; Milanovic 2016), and within an argument that portrays labour informality as a positive way of contesting protections within the formal sector (Ravallion 2017: 16).

Corollaries of neo-liberalisation include Fatalism, the Crises and Rescue Traps, and Polemicism. As noted, marketisation invited fatalism and the crisis paradox, by generating grounds for a form of Basic Income defence that takes the market project as irreversible or fact, side-lining questions about the market’s good or complexity, in favour of describing Basic Income as rescue. If marketisation has invited fatalism—the idea that social positions are irretrievably eroded—then in turn austerity has reinforced polemicism, by drawing out a historical narrative tendency to pit Basic Income against regulation (for instance, minimum wages, work-time regulation, labour standards, needsbased welfare, and so on). In turn, a notion that Basic Income is ‘radical’, or a broad solution to contemporary problems, plays into the hands of sceptics who see Basic Income as a ‘policy alternative’. A good example is the charge that Basic Income necessarily competes with universal services (see further Haagh 2019a for a critique): an argument initiated by think tanks in the UK under conditions of deep public austerity (see Chapter 12 in this volume).

ii. Economic Populism Te conditions for the rescue trap also carry a risk of populism or the perception of it in relation to the portrayal of Basic Income in media and political circles. When talking about Basic Income populism, it is important to distinguish between discursive populism and political populism, the latter being the manipulation of subjects in the pursuit of power. The former may serve the latter, but they are not the same. To illustrate: discursive populism can be an outcome of distortion by the usurpation of an idea by others. Or it can be an outcome of applying a purely theoretical idea to a more complex real context. Discursive populism can involve political self-deception, as defned by Galeotti (2018) as ‘the distortion of reality against the available evidence and according to one’s wishes’. Libertarian philosophy is defned by wishing individuals’ power were greater, and to this extent it is prone to self-deception in the context of addressing more complex governance problems. It is thus evident that in a context of political opportunity for Basic Income at a time of neo-liberal globalisation, Basic Income narrative would be prone to discursive populism, given the strong influence historically of libertarian theory or reasoning in making the case.