A/HRC/35/26 23. Murray’s principal book is entitled In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State.25 He calls for a “guaranteed income” to replace the welfare state which he sees as degrading “the traditions of work, thrift and neighbourliness” while also spawning “social and economic problems that it is powerless to solve”. He rails against the “new cultural consensus” produced by the welfare state, which considers that “the purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible, and the purpose of government is to make that process as easy as possible”. He argues that a satisfying human life “requires being enmeshed in the stuff of life”, and that by “stripping the institutions of family and community of many of their functions and responsibilities”, the welfare state “drains too much of the life from life”. Replacing the welfare state by a basic income would restore the community to its place as “the locus within which human needs must be met, and the effects could be profound”.26 24. Further support for the theory comes from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., which reviews the support given to basic income by free-market and libertarian thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, Charles Murray and Matt Zwolinski. Its view is that while the idea may look good on paper, the “further one moves from theory to implementation, the more the theoretical advantages dissipate”. 27 The main objection is affordability, since a universal basic income scheme “would cost far more than the current welfare system”.28 25. Some authors on the left of the political spectrum have been enthusiastic supporters of basic income. Guy Standing, a labour economist, has popularized the notion of a “precariat”, a very large segment of the population, whose lives are “dominated by insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation. They are becoming denizens rather than citizens, losing cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights built up over generations”. He argues that in an ever more unequal society, the precariat’s relative deprivation is severe.29 According to Standing, a basic income would allow people to move in and out of the labour market more easily and would “enable citizens to accept low wages and to bargain more strongly”.30 Standing has also been involved in important pilot projects in India.31 26. Philosophers on the left, such as Kathi Weeks, have defended basic income from an autonomist Marxist perspective, arguing that it “attempts to address … the realities of postFordist work, to offer a measure of security in an economy of precariousness”. 32 The philosopher Michael Howard supports basic income, claiming that it is not incompatible with Marxism or socialism and should be combined with strategies for full employment. 33 But others on the left have been critical. Alex Gourevitch argues that basic income is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for eliminating authoritarian work conditions, which he sees as the biggest challenge. 34 27. Broader political support is suggested by former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who suggests that basic income could possibly be financed out of the profits coming from labour-replacing innovations, or perhaps even from a revenue stream 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 See https://www.aei.org/scholar/charles-murray/. Charles Murray, “Guaranteed income as a replacement for the welfare state” (The Foundation for Law, Justice and Society), p. 7. Tanner, “The pros and cons of a guaranteed national income”, p. 15. Ibid., p. 26. Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011), pp. 10 and 11. Ibid., p. 178. Sarath Davala, Renana Jhabvala, Soumya Kapoor Mehta and Guy Standing, Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011), p. 150. Michael Howard, “Basic income, liberal neutrality, socialism, and work”, Review of Social Economy (December 2005), p. 613. Alex Gourevitch, “The limits of a basic income: means and ends of workplace democracy”, Basic Income Studies, vol. 11, No. 1 (2016), p. 17. 9