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LPE Originals

Basic Income and the Freedom to Refuse

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It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work.
LPE Originals

Basic Income, Care, and Wages for Housework

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The question of whether basic income can resolve the problem of unpaid care work and the status of care work more generally requires addressing how a basic income is financed, because it is only as a redistributive program that basic income can have an emancipatory effect for those whose work is obscured by the structure of modern capitalist economies and undervalued by the market. It is only by broadening our perspective, for the moment, away from the details of basic income as a social policy, and to basic income as a revolutionary perspective on capitalism, that the emancipatory effect becomes clear.
LPE Originals

UBI and Immigrants: Lessons from the Pandemic

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Surely advocates of such programs do not envision Qatar as their model society. And yet it is too easy to imagine a version of a Gulf state arising from a basic income initiative that provides cash support to citizens, who no longer need to take work that is unsatisfying, while denying it to noncitizens, who are brought in do the difficult and dangerous jobs that remain.
LPE Originals

Property Without Autonomy

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I want to suggest, however, that autonomy—even Dagan’s rehabilitated, communitarian conception of it—is a myth. Rather, the dependence and reliance (the vulnerability) against which autonomy is pitted is not pathogenic. It is not pathological. It is not an error to be fixed or a deficiency to be remedied.”
LPE Originals

Property, Collectivity, and Restraint

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Dyal Chand’s concern is that Dagan’s vision does not ensure the level of collective restraint that will be required to pull us back from our current state of crisis. Some of the choices that Dagan argues should remain available to self-actualizing individuals, particularly those that allow for more individualized decision-making, may simply be unwise to keep available at a time when the pursuit of autonomy through property has produced serious collective harms.

LPE Originals

Liberal Property Law vs. Capitalism

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This is part of our symposium on Hanoch Dagan’s book, A Liberal Theory of Property. For a concise version of Dagan’s argument, see this restatement. Image credit: Sam Abell, National Geographic. Hanoch Dagan has written a wonderful, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book. Its publication could have hardly come at a more prescient time. Many observers and commentators rightly despair over the…
LPE Originals

Liberalism, Property, and the Means of Production

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In this post, we specifically consider liberal defenses of private property in the “means of production”. This focus allows us to put the liberal defense of private property into dialogue with Marxism, with which it shares a broad humanistic heritage and many particular normative framings. Our focus also connects liberal property theory with a variety of later critiques of private property in certain productive resources, including those of the progressive and realist lawyers who generated American doctrines concerning “public utility” and other modes of resource governance that are neither strictly “private property” nor strictly matters of state control.