A basic income is sustainable, even if capitalism isn’t – the plan provides an regime with a new net zero level for welfare, that grows with development.
Parijs 95 {“Real Freedom for All : What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?” Philippe Van Parijs (Studied philosophy, law, political economy, sociology and linguistics at the Facultés universitaires Saint Louis (Brussels) and the Universities of Louvain, Oxford, Bielefeld and California (Berkeley). He holds doctorates in the social sciences (Louvain, 1977) and in philosophy (Oxford, 1980). He is Professor at the Faculty of economic, social and political sciences of the University of Louvain (UCL), where he has directed the Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics since its creation in 1991. He has also been a special guest professor at the KuLeuven's Higher Institute for Philosophy since 2006. From 2004 onwards he was for several years a Regular Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University). Oxford Political Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Published 1995, Accessed June 23, 2023. doi.org/10.1093/0198293577.001.0001.}–CPSW–TW
The time has now come to remember that several of the most famous arguments in favour of socialism have focused on its superior dynamic efficiency, on its greater ability to generate new productive resources, rather than on its being better at using existing ones. For example, the theory of the falling rate of pro fit, when interpreted as a theory of breakdown rather than of crises, aims to show that capitalism is bound to become ever worse at accumulating capital, while the famous assertion, central to historical materialism, that the development of the productive forces tends to become ‘fettered’ under capitalism is most naturally interpreted as a claim about capitalism's systematically suboptimal choice of techniques. One may wonder, however, whether such arguments are relevant at all from a real-libertarian point of view. Accumulation and technical progress increase the productive potential of future generations. By doing so, they can no doubt improve the real freedom of the least-advantaged in those generations. But the saving required for accumulation and the research and development required for technical progress represent a cost to the present generation, a diversion of resources that could have been used to improve the situation of its worst off member. And it would, therefore, be illegitimate to keep this member's real freedom down in order to increase beyond this level the real freedom of the worst off in the next generation.42 If it could be shown that, say, socialism is far better than capitalism in terms of dynamic efficiency thus conceived, it would follow that the real freedom that can be granted to the worst off in the current generation of a society that has been socialist for some generations is greater, ceteris paribus, than had it been capitalist all along. But the question is not whether it is better, from a real-libertarian perspective, that a society should have been socialist rather than capitalist for some generations, but whether it is better, for the sake of the real freedom of its (present or future) worst off member, that it should opt for socialism now.
And yet, from a real-libertarian perspective, dynamic efficiency considerations are of crucial importance. Remember that the unconditional income must be pitched at a level that is sustainable across generations. If there is demographic growth, it is obvious enough that this requires economic growth at the same pace, and hence that a regime which fosters accumulation and technical progress more than others do, for a given current level of basic income, will enjoy an important advantage. In a dynamically less efficient economy, the current level of basic income may prove unsustainable in the next, more numerous, generation, whereas it is not in the dynamically more efficient economy. Even in the absence of demographic growth, and hence in the absence of a (justice-based) need for net growth, dynamic efficiency is still of crucial importance. If, again for a given current level of basic income, one regime has a greater propensity to accumulate and innovate, and hence expand production, it follows that it has more leeway for increasing the basic income now above its current level and hence has the potential for sustaining a higher basic income across generations. Thus, the optimal regime —basic income level included—need not be the one with the highest rate of growth. With a stationary population, it need not even have a positive rate of growth. Yet, having a greater propensity to grow—displaying, subject to the usual constraints, a higher rate of accumulation and/or technical progress at given levels of basic income—provides a socio-economic regime with a highly relevant advantage in terms of real-freedom-for-all.43 As we shall see later (§ 6.7), whether a particular socio-economic regime does better or worse than another in terms of dynamic efficiency so conceived may crucially depend on the level of basic income that features in the background of the comparison. Throughout the present section, however, I shall abstract from this possibility and tacitly assume that a regime's greater dynamic efficiency (its systematically higher rate of capital accumulation and/or technical progress) at, say, a zero level of basic income, means ipso facto that there will be more available for distribution in the form of a basic income.