K turns the case. They didn’t specify, basic income will be interpreted to be time-limited. K turns and solves the case but the case can’t solve the k or their aff.

To surmise, the cases examined bear out how contexts of economic liberalisation forefront the Inequality Paradox, whereby Basic Income presumes and sets forth equality of standing, yet it relies on, whilst being unable to create, substantive equality (Haagh 2019d). In a context of unstable public development fnance, the scope for a genuinely life-long Basic Income, and hence the permanent sense of security rightly envisaged as key to the emancipatory efects of a Basic Income, are hard to conceive. Neo-liberalisation threatens to disrupt the reality or intended effect of some of the core features of Basic Income in practice.

Te frst feature is permanence. Te idea of a Basic Income for life is implicit in classic texts, as far back as Spence. Envisaging Basic Income as permanent is not only a feature of its universality, but is an essential component part of Basic Income as advocates view it. It is a form of property. Yet, in debates about Basic Income since 2016, particularly but not only in developing countries, the permanent character of Basic Income has all but vanished from view. Although much of the scholarly literature on Basic Income assumes that Basic Income has internal integrity as a life-long structure of individual security sufcient to live on, a range of usage-meanings have the implication that a Basic Income scheme might be time-delimited. Te public attractiveness of a time delimited grant is that it introduces some elements of Basic Income (like universality or unconditionality) but without going the whole way to permanency. In private pilots where universality is tested within a small community there is often not the money to test over a longer period. In developing countries, the connection with public reform and fnance is often tenuous. Te private experiment in Kenya—Give Directly—which is set to test over a period of 12 years, is a case in point.

Without permanence, however, schemes mimicking other features of Basic Income will be prone to undermine the psychological and economic efects of cash grant schemes. For example, studies show that cash grants schemes, which alleviate for periods of time, act to sustain individuals and families in cycles of clientelistic dependence on scheme evaluators, in particular where genuine occupational opportunities are weak (Larrañaga et al. 2012: 366, 369). Motivational efects are lower within marginal communities (Haagh 2011b). Nutritional gains were linked with separate nutrition supplement programmes, and the efects disappeared when these were withdrawn (Cecchini and Martínez 2012: 105).

Neo-liberalisation also undermines universality in efect, which can be described as an intention not only that everyone is reached, but that Basic Income helps to secure equal standing, and key dimensions of equality of opportunity, such as occupational choice (Haagh 2007b): all of which depend on high social equality being attained.

One of the key advantages of a universal Basic Income is the removal of stigma. However, the higher the inequality in a country, the more likely it is that a Basic Income becomes a targeted policy in efect (Haagh 2019d). A singular universal policy under these conditions can simply justify inequality. As long as the primary intention of welfare is to alleviate the situation of the worst off, public policy will remain narrowly focussed and poorly funded, concealing the wider causes that recreate poverty.

A concern in this context is that a new emerging recipe for combining protection of the ‘marginal’ with ever greater liberalisation of work contract conditions will cast Basic Income as a buttress of precarious informality. As Larrañaga et al. (2012: 366, 369) have shown, the ‘marginalisation hypothesis’ which accompanied narrow targeting in Chile entails identifying only the group lacking income at a given point, when transient insecurity in work is far greater and the real cause of uncertainty (Nun and Trucco 2008; see also Haagh 1999, 2002b, c, d).

Attacking poverty in a high inequality country entails by defnition a low Basic Income, and isolates the policy from other programmes, in the same way as a targeted scheme narrows the target of policy. In this context, the universality of Basic Income is washed away in efect, because the efect is eroded by lack of real social equality. Universality becomes but a technical trick, worked out through the tax nexus. Te issue is not whether progressive taxation undermines the strict equality principle, because strict equality is not a good measure of equality of standing. Te problem rather is that equality of substantive opportunities, and thus of outcome, is so weak that the status equality entailed in Basic Income becomes less efective.

Unconditionality and individuality signal an intent that Basic Income will erode status and gender distinctions. Neo-liberalisation casts these efects into doubt too. As has been seen in Europe, where movements for formal equality of the 1970s and 1980s turned into a basis for new gender inequalities in the market of the 2010s, equal individual responsibility in the market is not freedom for women. In countries like India, where the key issue for women in rural areas is access to land (Ministry of Rural Development of India 2009: xiv), the wider efects of Basic Income must be translated by other conditions.

Finally, the economic security efect of Basic Income relies on its non-mortgageability. Tis is one of the internal complementarities that need to be fulflled for Basic Income to be efective. Devil’s deals discursively or actually overdraw a Basic Income’s efect in this context by obscuring or inadvertently idealising the very informality that weakens social opportunities. Whether in the case of indentured labour, the homeless, or the eternally indebted, a Basic Income without a legal framework could become simply usurped into other unequal structures. Te problem of fnancialisation of Basic Income draws attention to the Equality Paradox, the claim that Basic Income is more likely and efective in conditions of greater social equality. A corollary of this paradox is a Lageality Paradox. Social problems can only be efectively addressed legally where they are not too prevalent. Financialisation of Basic Income could normalise the prevalence and coercive force of debt-dependent relations. A similar point is made by the economist Lena Lavinas when pointing out the normalisation of ‘over-indebtedness’ as a function of its prevalence (2018: 504). Where conditions are poor, legality is debased.

As argued in the second section of this chapter, Basic Income may be a distributive tool without being a source of a property right in stability either legally or de facto. Te relevance of this distinction is apparent in the case of the documented efects of unconditional cash grants in India. Usurpation of cash grants within the Basic Income pilot in India into payment of private school fees or tuition fees by over two-thirds of recipients (Davala et al. 2015: 119) demonstrates the permeability of Basic Income to privatisation. To be sure, this is not a case against Basic Income in itself, as it is a better alternative to clientelistic schemes, but it is representative of the potential usurpation within a wider project to turn the poor into mortgaged and dependent consumers.

Te problem of the fnancialisation of welfare and of a potential future Basic Income also exists in developed countries. Basic Income might alleviate but not solve homelessness or the legal poverty it entails. Will fnes for rough sleeping simply increase when authorities know that the homeless have more cash? (Illustrating the monetisation of deterring homelessness, an article in Te Guardian detailed the rise in cases of criminalisation of begging and rough sleeping through the use of criminal behaviour orders, with fxed penalty notices rising from £100 to over £1000, and the potential for imprisonment for up to fve years (Greenfeld and Marsh 2018)). In the end, non-mortgageability cannot be simply decreed. Financialisation of development by defnition cannot be regulated, because its structure involves the expansion of opportunities for extracting proft from repackaging credit products, which generates interest in repackaging in new forms, leading to the privatisation of welfare. Hence, in reality, containing fnancialisation and expanding the sphere of Basic Income—its non-mortgageability in practice—involves scafolding the efect of Basic Income on economic security by expanding the sphere of public goods. Inequality and the poor conditions that result from it weaken the force and everyday reality of law (Haagh 2019a). Te efectiveness of particular egalitarian legal provisions is tied to the general prevalence of social equality, and in this the Basic Income—as a legal right to security—is no exception.

Conclusion Surveying core narrative claims and contexts within Basic Income debate, in this chapter I have made the following four arguments. First, it was more plausible to talk about a Basic Income as an instrument of freedom and social progress when economic development and fnance were more rooted in national development frameworks, in the 1970s and 1980s. As subsequently destabilised fnance fows have attained a greater efect on daily life and on the organisation of production, the freedom claim in particular has grown more tenuous.

Second, during the same period, there has been a shift towards a discourse focussed on Basic Income as an instrument of development that in turn is often tied to a vision of bottom-up development, complementing a case for direct democracy. However, these arguments are also problematic, for the same reason that the freedom argument is.

My third argument is related to what the frst two arguments reveal, namely the fact that the case for Basic Income is weak on its own, yet the origins and development of Basic Income debate entail a tendency to present Basic Income in singular terms, which is reinforced by the greater moral force of the case in conditions of macro-crises. Tis drives an orientation towards a certain kind of advocacy and schools of thought taking up the cause of Basic Income in the form of versions of libertarianism and of narratives linked with pure critique or utopia.

Tis leads to my fourth argument, which centres on how, given the changes that have occurred in global capitalism, a utopian perspective is more likely to run advocates into the arms of an Opportunity Paradox. In so far as crises enlarge the systemic case for reform it the direction of Basic Income, crises make the singular case appear plausible, as well as attractive. However, overarching claims concerning ways in which Basic Income supports freedom and development are less plausible to the extent that protective welfare state institutions have crumbled in the face of globalised fnance.

Te implications for Basic Income debate, and core narrative claims linked with freedom and security in particular, are quite profound, in three ways: Firstly, the efects of Basic Income in relation to economic security may be far less clear in the very countries where this efect tends to be highlighted in crisis conditions, for instance, in countries like the US and UK, or India, with higher or growing inequality. Secondly, the efect on freedom may be greater in countries with more regulation, which is contrary to the claim that Basic Income enhances freedom on grounds of lowering paternalism. Tirdly, whilst a Basic Income could ofset insecurity for those at the bottom, in so far as inequalities are structural (for instance, tied to occupational participation and its determinants), as long as those inequalities remain, it is predictable that labour and housing, and other price structures, would adjust around the new income security system. Te uncertainties linked with consumption or housing structures tied to unsecured debt would not disappear. An underlying tension within Basic Income narrative within and outside Europe today is then the way in which the rise of a moral case for Basic Income is contradicted by weaker public capacity. Te wider argument of this paper is that whether due to the central infuence of libertarian arguments, or due to changes in capitalism, or indeed the interaction between the two, Basic Income debate globally has been driven towards making decontextualised claims.

Tis then leads to my fourth and fnal argument, which is a need to clarify the broader institutional foundations for reform in the direction of Basic Income. Te only way to rescue the Basic Income argument is to understand its connection with the public regulatory domain. Te central analytical challenge for those interested in Basic Income is to understand the context, while limiting the claims about reform in the direction of Basic Income. When it comes to the plausibility of Basic Income narrative, the old saying remains relevant, that ‘less is more’.