|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
A Guaranteed Minimum Income as a Constitutional Right |
Current rating: 0 |
by Ralf Dahrendorf
Email: mbatko (nospam) lycos.com (verified) |
13 Apr 2006
|
|
A guaranteed minimum income could be seen as a constitutional right like the franchise and equal protection before the law. This 1986 essay shows us a human alternative to the dystopia of permanent war. I apologize for the translation errors. |
A GUARANTEED MINIMUM INCOME AS A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT
By Ralf Dahrendorf
[This article published in: Befreiung von falscher Arbeit. Thesen zum garantierten Mindesteinkommen, ed. By Thomas Schmid, 1986 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.archiv-grundeinkommen.de/bvfa/dahrendorf.htm. Ralf Dahrendorf is a renowned German-born sociologist, author of numerous acclaimed books, a former European Commissioner from Germany, a member of the British House of Lords, a former rector of the London School of Economics and a former Warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford.]
Allying with the devil often seems useful in practical politics. The right thing can only be done in coalition with others who want the same thing even if for the wrong reasons. The educational reform of the sixties was an example. The argument of the “German education catastrophe” was false from the beginning. A relation between educational expansion and economic growth was assumed though no reasons existed. Only with the help of so-called spurious correlations or pseudo-statistical connections could a certain urgency be given to the claim that the next step of economic growth requires a higher number of high school graduates. To be sure, there were countries that had both more high school students and higher growth rates. However no connection existed between the two. The pseudo-statistical connection attracted politicians. Education is a civil right. The wrong reasons undoubtedly drove the expansion of the sixties and seventies.
Whoever makes an alliance with the devil pays a high price. The superficial alliance of civil rights reformers and growth reformers may have moved state parliaments to increased spending for continuing education but has also led to the wrong kind of reform and to the weakening of accomplishments. That kind of reform was wrong because it treated educational institutional (to speak with Christopher Jencks) as “factories.” Blind expansion should be immediately reflected in a new growth push. Many things that constitute the charm and quality of schools and universities fall by the wayside. The economic hope proved misguided. Disillusionment followed almost necessarily. Now since disillusionment occurs, the educational institutions have almost no advocates anymore except for those with tangible interests.
The new building erected on shaky ground falls in the landslide.
This example is not chosen by chance. The demand of a guaranteed minimum income had great strategic significance in the politics of the 1980s. However the 1980s also warn us of false arguments and false alliances. This is also true for two categories of system changers who at the end only stabilize the status quo.
The first of these categories has the goal of uncoupling work and income. This is a great and important theme. In fact, paid work has long lost its central place in the life of most people that justified the talk of the work society. Something shrill lies in the business-union demand not to despise the importance of paid work. This runs crossway to the developments of a century in which the “kingdom of freedom” has constantly expanded in the name of relief of work, even liberation from (“false”) work. We may be at a threshold to a society where paid work recedes compared to forms of free activity, at the end of the work society and at the beginning of something like the activity society. However only very privileged groups – for instance, young middle-class academics with civil service rights – can draw far-reaching advantages from this tendency. Thus the time has come to uncouple work and income. The less privileged know that occupation and paid work are still indispensable.
No other way has occurred to us for guaranteeing the welfare chances of a developed society than through work income. This is true for the redistribution elements of welfare, e.g. the non-wage labor costs and the welfare state.
- No other basis for the self-image and self-consciousness of people occurs to us than occupational position. The emancipation of women is tied to this. Where there are attempts at other self-images – like athletic performances or accomplishments of leisure activity – these usually have a suspicious resemblance to work.
- Finding other principles for structuring time than paid work has not succeeded. When the focal point of occupational work is lacking, people often do not know how to structure their daily-, weekly- and yearly plan (by television programs?).
- These are hard facts. Whoever does not notice them leaves the ground of reality and his or her suggestions become vague. This must be recognized when advocating the way from the work- to the activity society. This central theme should not be weakened by being mixed up with the minimum income theme.
What arguments are helpful? The development of work is certainly important. Work in the sense of paid gainful work has become scarce. Its reduction means that those with work – and thus income, privileges, self-esteem and life support – hold fast to their work. Thus not everyone finds paid work. A process begins with unforeseeable consequences. A society that arduously conquered citizen rights for everyone begins to exclude people more and more, defining people more and more out of the enjoyment of these rights. The society of equal citizens becomes a society of the majority class of members while an underclass of non-members knocks in vain at its gates. The consequences are momentous even if they are not recognized immediately. While underclasses do not make revolution, their members do not feel bound to the effective norms. The legal- and social order is weakened by the basic uncertainty that from the underclass eats into the official society of the majority. This is particularly true when the gray zone between (work-) owners and non-owners is very striking. At the end the contract of society itself seems threatened.
This is a very concise and superficial argument. There is a very different justification for a guaranteed minimum income, justification through citizen rights. If guaranteeing a material support is not one of the basic rights of every citizen, then the citizen society disintegrates. In other words, the uncoupling of income from work is necessary for defining the common floor on which everyone stands.
Neither pure welfare nor revival of the saying that whoever does not work should not eat is enough. Creating a society in which it is rewarding to live is imperative. Many other things must be done with regard to (the distribution of) work. The guaranteed minimum income is as necessary as the other civic rights, equality before the law or the universal equal franchise. Thus the uncouplers correctly recognize something but make it the necessary and sufficient condition of the just society. As a result, they reveal their special group privileges. This is also true in another way for a second group of system changers who have spoken out on this theme, the economists of the Kronberg circle.
In their paper on the “citizen tax” and the “citizen income,” these economists take up the idea of the negative income tax. They turn against all subsidy systems that create their own offices and bureaucracies for particular areas of public activity. They rightly argue that these bureaucracies are often expensive and hardly efficient. They prefer a single authority, the internal revenue service, in place of all insurance bodies and redistribution offices. The taxman takes or gives in a formal-administrative way. Thus the different need scales of the welfare state and the many authorities are reduced to a single scale and authority – an attractive idea that could remove the humiliation of citizens by welfare bureaucracies and help amid the nonsense that the individual receives back from the state what he paid in taxes and fees minus the costs for administering redistribution.
Still a fundamental question mark is in order. The economizing of rights is a theme that is not less explosive and difficult than work and its relation to income. A massive difference of opinion underlies many conflicts over present policy. Some think that all needs can be met at the end of the “normal” allocation process of the economy not hindered by “artificial” barriers. They rely on growth. Unemployment would disappear by itself if the economy only grows adequately and the labor market functions without difficulties. “Structural” questions are only witnesses of unfortunate incursions in the perfect process of the market. However some persistently argue that rights – for example that freedom of contract by which the market a la Adam Smith was first constituted – do not emerge automatically from the market process. They demand their own decisions. Rights are elements of social contracts. Guaranteed minimum income is one of these rights. Whoever makes the negative income tax completely independent or whoever relies completely on the tax system differentiating between direct and indirect income gives free rein to the removal of all legal guarantees. One could even argue that the work society is smuggled into the system again through a side-door. In other words, people are only valued as they are relevant for the tax system. A form of the negative income tax could provide a proper guarantee for the minimum income. Demanding that citizen rights be first defined and afterwards methods for their satisfaction is not a sophistry.
All this is not said out of enjoyment of argument. Why do liberals hesitate? Wouldn’t it be simpler to first establish the minimum income guaranteed by the negative income tax and then see what happens? I don’t think so. Shaky coalitions lead to unreliable decisions. At the end, one would fiddle with the tax rate and the other would chase after the chimera of a society completely liberated from work. The guaranteed minimum income would be the casualty.
The decision that is necessary is very different. In its quality, it is not different than the guarantee of equality before the law and equal franchise. An irrevocable step has to be taken. Constitutions certainly do not protect from tyrants or the media charisma of populist leaders. However when constitutions are good, they embody the best accomplishments of a civilized society. In the normal course of things, good constitutions at least bind the hands of the politically active. In the non-normal course, they create a barrier for corrupt decisions. The minimum income belongs to the constitution in the wider sense. It must be accepted as a basic element of citizen rights because it defines a starting position behind which no one may fall.
This initiative has concrete consequences. Whoever wants to uncouple work and income must demand the highest possible minimum income. Whoever only wants the standardization of the scales in a single (positive and negative) tax system can be heartless or social. On the other hand, whoever wants the guaranteed minimum income as a citizen right must begin with a moderate amount that can be guaranteed. This need not be above the current income support level. Its unassailability, its character as a right, is crucial.
Constitutional economists have rightly remarked that the lasting bonds of politics can only be enforced in unusual situations. Only in a time of hyperinflation can one hope to enforce constitutional limitations on monetary policy, budgetary policy or collective bargaining decisions. Something similar may be true for the guaranteed minimum income. A time in which high unemployment coincides with legitimate uncertainty in the traditional welfare state may be near this exceptional situation. Keeping alive the discussion is vital. |
See also:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
http://www.commondreams.org
|
