Robert Anton Wilson advocated a basic income guarantee -- he was agnostic about the form it would take -- and the idea continues to bubble up.
Allen Sheahen has written a new book about the idea, A Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security. Well, actually it's an updated version of an old book.
The excellent Dangerous Minds blog recently has run two pieces by Sheahen, one here and a followup piece here.
Sheahen is a leftist. But interestingly, a look at the reviews of Sheahen's book on Amazon show that his book is endorsed by Charles Murray, the libertarian writer who advocated a basic income guarantee in his book, In Our Hands.
I suppose it doesn't have anything to do with Sheahen's argument, but I notice that while the Kindle price of Murray's book is a reasonable $11.72, Sheahen's tome costs $25.27.
2 comments:
Two days ago I finished reading Murray's stuff on basic income. The welfare system is so bad that this is better, thinks Murray.
One of the most striking things about the history of this idea is, to me, how it attracts thinkers who are outside the mainstream of corporate-owned political discourse on both the (Euclidean) "Right" and "Left."
As we trace the strains of this thought back to Thomas Paine and further - to the Renaissance humanists - I think we see an alternative universe of political ideas that..."could have been" and still might "be."
The more I study robotics and technological unemployment and the Pentagon and the 3 "branches" of government in Unistat, the more I think something like this MUST happen. And sooner rather than later.
And yet: try to sport a peep on it in the corporate electronic media. It's up to us to get this idea (meme?) into mainstream talk.
Thanks for this!
Michael,
I just finished Charles Murray's latest book, "Coming Apart," and he also brings up his support for a basic income guarantee there, too.
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