Basic
Income
Guarantee

As Australia heads towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century the struggle to introduce a universal Basic Income has reached a hiatus. Many of us are hopeful of moving forward but are uncertain as to when or how. A right-wing government was, after 12 years in office, replaced by a cautious centre-left government in late 2007. There have been some industrial gains made by the unions, social housing has been considerably expanded, increased funding has been provided to improve education and a more just approach taken towards asylum seekers and unemployed people. Reviews are currently underway into the structure of the health, tax and social security systems. The directions taken by the government, particularly in relation to taxation and social security, will determine how we proceed to promote Basic Income.

Mr. Dilthey, how did you get to the idea of Basic Income and how long do you deal with this topic?

In the early 1980’s I speculated about questions of value creation and automation as I visited a “politic regular table”. Already in that time we got to the conclusion, that wages are at least partly a shifting of the economic value creation. Because of a faster production, even in those days the effect of shifting the wages was not sufficient possible. So we came with our thoughts to the conclusion to introduce something like a “levy on value creation” and to pay the profit out of it should be paid to people helping the effect of shifting the wages.

1. THE CITIZEN”S INCOME TRUST.

The Basic Income Research Group, BIRG, was set up informally in 1984.   At the first international conference on Basic Income at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, in 1986, we helped to set up the Basic Income European Network, BIEN, (which in 2004 became the Basic Income Earth Network).   In 1989, BIRG became a charity, (No. 328198), with legal concessions.   Between 1991 and 2001, we received generous support from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation.  The JRCT encouraged us to change our name to The Citizen’s Income Trust in 1992.  We were enabled to hire 2 part-time members of staff and rent small offices in London, to continue to produce our BIRG/CI Bulletin, to organise seminars and conferences, set up a website, and submit evidence to government consultations, among other things.  We also hosted the 1994 BIEN congress in London.

The current situation in Ireland is that we do not have universal basic income. The issue has been taken seriously enough for there to have been some government studies of basic income although they have been on the whole negative. You can access these and other relevant information about Ireland at the web site of the main proponent of basic income in Ireland, the Justice Office of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI Justice).

Brief history of Basic Income in Japan

If we follow an explanation of the history of basic income at the homepage of the Basic Income Earth Network, at the same time if being liberated from Eurocentric knowledge, China in 6th century and Japan in 7th century already had an embryo of basic income, although it explained that the embryo appeared firstly at Leuvain in 16th century.  These ancient regimes in East Asia tried to supply the “means of livelihood” before taxation and in a secular way, though the homepage saying this idea first appeared in Thomas More’s “Utopia” which was published 1616 in Leuvain.

Austria is one of the richest countries in the European Union (2006: 4th place of all 27 EU-countries). This is one side of the social situation in Austria. The others are:

The debate about Basic Income in Spain is linked to the notion of the Welfare State. Critics of Basic Income tend to aver that Basic Income is in opposition the Welfare State. Sometimes they assert that Basic Income would be financed through cutting back the advances made by the Welfare State in public health and education, for example. Basic Income would indeed be in opposition to the Welfare State if the aim were really to finance it by cut-backs in education and health services or by dismantling them completely. Apart from this being an enormous financial blunder, no Basic Income supporter would support such a proposal. If a Basic Income were financed in this way, the poorer members of the population would be even worse off than they are at present.

Nazip Khamitov has a PHD in philosophy, he is a writer, a leading researcher and a Colleague at the institute of philosophy, and he is a founder of Meta-Anthropology: the study of the daily, highest and furthering of the being of humans. Author of more than 20 books, of which most well-known are: “Philosophy: Being, Human and World,” “Loneliness of Men and Women,” “Aphorism of Force,” and “Ethics: The Path to Beautiful Relations”. The last of which was co-authored by Svitlana Krylova.

Guaranteed income was a mainstream idea in the United States in the 1960s. Leading economists, including several who later won the Nobel Prize, endorsed it. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum – and livable – income for every American family.” A plan to guarantee cash payments to poor families passed the House of Representatives by a two-to-one vote, but was narrowly blocked in the Senate.