The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income

Michael Cholbi, Michael Weber, Michael Cholbi, Michael Weber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429850127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Condizioni economiche

Technological advances in computerization and robotics threaten to eliminate countless jobs from the labor market in the near future. These advances have reignited the debate about universal basic income. The essays in this collection offer unique and compelling perspectives on the ever-changing nature of work and the plausibility of a universal basic income to address the elimination of jobs from the workforce. The essays address a number of topics related to these issues, including the prospects of libertarian and anarchist justifications for a universal basic income, the positive impact of a basic income on intimate laborers such as sex workers and surrogates, the nature of "bad work" and who will do it if everyone receives a basic income, whether a universal basic income is objectionably paternalistic, and viable alternatives to a universal basic income. This book raises complex questions and avenues for future research about universal basic income and the future of work in our increasingly technological society. It will be of keen interest to graduate students and scholars in political philosophy, economics, political science, and public policy who are interested in these debates.

1
A Hayekian Case for Free Markets and a Basic Income

Matt Zwolinski

Introduction

For better or for worse, there are now a substantial number of Americans who know the name of Friedrich Hayek only because his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, was recommended by FOX News personality Glenn Beck as a prescient warning about the dangerous trajectory of the Obama Administration. Most of those people, I suspect, would be quite chagrined to discover that, consistently and throughout his entire career, Hayek defended the rather socialist-sounding idea of an “equal minimum income for all.”¹

There is certainly something of a paradox here. Hayek, one of the best-known free-market libertarians of the twentieth century, was also a defender of what many regard as the apotheosis of the welfare state—a basic income guarantee. And Hayek himself was little help in resolving this paradox. Although his support for a basic income guarantee was consistent throughout his career, Hayek never really provided much detail about why he supported it. Many readers were thus left with the forgivable impression that Hayek’s support was a kind of fluke—an idiosyncrasy that reflects either (if you’re sympathetic to libertarianism) a failure to think through the full logical commitments of his individualistic premises, or (if you’re not) a trace of compassion and humanity that his libertarian ideology failed to fully extinguish.

The thesis of this chapter is that Hayek’s support of a basic income guarantee was not a fluke. Or rather, since I wish to put the emphasis on positive political philosophy rather than Hayekian exegesis, that it need not be a fluke for those of us who draw inspiration from Hayek’s ideas. What I shall argue is that a commitment to both the libertarian ideals of free markets and limited government, and to the idea of a basic income guarantee, both flow naturally from Hayek’s fundamental commitment to individual liberty, understood as the absence of coercion.²

This thesis, I hope, will be of interest to more than just Hayekians. The Hayekian case for free markets and a basic income, as I understand it, is rooted in Hayek’s distinctive understanding of the nature of freedom, and how that freedom operates in a market economy. That understanding of freedom, I will argue, has much in common with the neo-republican conception advanced by theorists such as Philip Pettit.³ And it is superior to the standard, rights-based account of freedom adopted by libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.⁴ Thus, one goal of this chapter is to convince non-Hayekian libertarians to adjust their understanding of freedom. This, I believe, will go a long way toward undermining a major source of resistance among libertarians to the idea of a basic income guarantee.

But I also think that non-libertarian republicans have something to learn from Hayek. Republicans in general, and Pettit in particular, have been adept at identifying sources of domination within the private sphere, and in suggesting various ways in which government can act so as to reduce the potential for domination. Where they have fallen short, I think, is in recognizing the ways in which market competition can itself serve as a powerful check against domination, and the ways in which even well-intentioned government policies can both reinforce existing and give rise to new forms of domination.⁵ A second goal of this chapter is thus to convince those already attracted to the republican idea of liberty to adopt a more Hayekian understanding of the role markets and governments play in advancing or retarding freedom, and thus, I think, move in a more libertarian direction on questions of public policy.

This chapter is divided into four sections. In the first, I examine more closely Hayek’s account of freedom and coercion, especially as developed in The Constitution of Liberty. In the second, I show how that account supports the libertarian position of free markets and limited government. In the third, I show how it supports a basic income guarantee. I conclude with the question of whether a guaranteed minimum income ought, as Hayek seems to have believed, to be contingent upon a willingness to work.

Hayek’s Account of Freedom and Coercion

Early in The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek defines freedom as the absence of coercion.⁶ In doing so, Hayek appears, at least to the casual reader, to be following the standard libertarian line. If freedom can be infringed only by coercion, then lack of power or lack of wealth would not appear to render an individual unfree.⁷ Taxes and regulations imposed by the government, in contrast, do seem coercive and thus do seem to constitute an infringement of freedom on this view.

A close reading reveals, however, that Hayek’s understanding of freedom diverges from that of the standard libertarian in terms of both its underling theory and its practical implications. In terms of theory, standard libertarians such as Rothbard and Nozick understand coercion as a moralized term that makes essential reference to the idea of individual rights. Libertarians believe, roughly, that A coerces B if and only if A proposes to violate B’s rights unless B complies with A’s demands.⁸ Since governments do not have the right to seize an individual’s justly held wealth without her consent, its threat to fine or imprison individuals who do not pay their taxes is viewed by libertarians as coercive. Taxation is theft.

As many critics of libertarianism (and some friends!) have argued, the logical implication of this theory of freedom (combined with the libertarian’s underlying theory of rights rooted in self-ownership) would seem to be anarchism. Even a minimal state devoted solely to the protection of individuals’ negative rights would still require coercive taxation to finance its activities. But if all taxation is a violation of individual rights, then freedom and even the smallest of governments are necessarily incompatible.⁹

Hayek rejects the idea that freedom and coercion should be understood in terms of abstract natural rights. Instead, Hayek holds that freedom consists of being able to live one’s life “according to [one’s] own decisions and plans, in contrast to… one who was irrevocably subject to the will of another.”¹⁰ Coercion, in contrast, consists of a state in which “one man’s actions are made to serve another man’s will, not for his own but for the other’s purpose.”¹¹

According to Hayek, “coercion implies both the threat of inflicting harm and the intention to bring about certain conduct” by means of that threat.¹² The harm that is threatened will often take the form of physical violence, but Hayek notes that threats of brute force are not the only means by which coercion can be exercised.¹³ One can also coerce by effectively withholding a resource or service that is crucial to the existence of another individual or the preservation of that he or she most values.¹⁴ The owner of the only source of water in the middle of a desert, for instance, can wield coercive power through his ability to withhold that resource from others.¹⁵ Even a “morose husband, a nagging wife, or a hysterical mother” might be said to exercise “coercion of a particularly oppressive kind,” though in these cases any attempt to correct the coercion by means of government action would lead to “even greater coercion” and would thus be unacceptable in a liberal society.¹⁶

On this understanding of freedom, the activities of government can be coercive but need not be so. An absolute monarchy in which subjects’ lives property were subject to the whim of the king would clearly be a situation rife with coercion, on Hayek’s view. But, crucially, Hayek believed that a government consisting of general rules applied equally and impartially to all would not be coercive.¹⁷ Such rules would, of course, restrict what individuals could do. But insofar as they are general and applied equally to all, they do not render any individual subject to the will of any other individual. They are, in Hayek’s words, like “laws of nature”—stable facts of social existence around which individuals can learn to navigate and plan their lives. They do not place some citizens in a position of subordination, and they do not elevate others to a position of dominance.¹⁸

This view of freedom is not without its problems—some of which were pointed out by early libertarian critics of Hayek such as Ronald Hamowy.¹⁹ But one advantage it seems to have over traditional libertarian theories is its focus on the actual character of social relationships. For libertarians, freedom is understood in terms of abstract rights, which are themselves understood in a historical sense.²⁰ And thus, for the libertarian, we can never tell simply by looking at the character of a social relationship whether it is a state of freedom or unfreedom. A man is being dragged, fighting, into a car by stronger men armed with guns. Is his freedom being infringed? That depends. Is he a criminal who is being justly arrested by the police (or, if you prefer, by the Dominant Protection Agency)? Then, despite all appearances to the contrary, the answer is no—his freedom, that is, his rights, are not being infringed. A soldier is told when to eat, when to sleep, what to wear, and who to kill by his superiors, on threat of severe punishment for disobedience. Is he free? The libertarian’s answer is, not if he signed up for it. For the libertarian, it seems that there is no set of social arrangements so oppressive, no amount of being bossed around by others that is incompatible with freedom, so long as that situation arose in the right way. Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps, is itself just. And whatever arises from a free situation by freedom-respecting steps, is itself free.

Theodore Burczak has argued that the same is true of Hayek’s account since, according to Burczak, Hayek makes the presence or absence of coercion in a proposal depend on how the conditions in which that proposal was made came about.²¹ But this, I think, is a mistaken interpretation of Hayek’s position. For Hayek, it doesn’t matter how the wanderers in the desert became dependent on the monopolist. What matters is what the monopolist does with that power. If he threatens to withhold resources unless the others do as he wishes, he acts coercively. If he shares the water with them freely, he does not.

How is the monopolist’s position different from other forms of conditional transactions in the marketplace? Note that for Hayek it is not the mere presence of monopoly in the background that makes the proposal coercive. Someone who wishes to be painted by a particular artist but must pay a very high fee to do so is not coerced. Hayek’s explanation for this is that the painter’s service, unlike the water in the desert, is something one can easily do without.²² But as his later response to Hamowy makes clear, this is only part of the explanation. The deeper explanation is that, for Hayek, you do not have a right to the painter’s services, whereas you do have a right to life-saving water in the case of an emergency.²³ Hayek admits that he lacks a full account of why we have such a right in the desert case, but presumably the fact that the water is vital to our survival is one part of the story, and the fact that the situation is such where the normal mechanisms of supply and demand are insufficient to produce desirable outcomes is another.

With this clarification, Hayek’s account of coercion, and his analysis of the several cases he provides, appear to form a plausible and coherent whole. The key issue, for Hayek, is whether a proposal increases or decreases one’s options, relative to a baseline in which one’s moral and legal rights are respected. An offer of an unpleasant job from an employer is (generally) not coercive because it simply adds one option to whatever options one already has, and one does not generally have a right to work, or a paycheck, from any particular person. A gunman’s threat of “your money or your life” is coercive because it removes options—spe...