A Quick Word on BIG and p2p and Such

I have been gratified by the unexpected attention attracted by the post Live Long and Prosper: A Program of Technoprogressive Social Democracy, especially the good words over on WorldChanging and on the Responsible Nanotechnology blogs, a couple of my favorite daily online reads. It is no surprise that many of those who have bristled most at the post's technoprogressive recommendations are the various free-marketeers who throng technocentric fora in America to this day.

It is worth remembering that market libertarian Milton Friedman advocated something like a basic income guarantee (BIG) in his book Capitalism and Freedom, as have economists of the left like John Kenneth Galbraith. And it is also true that some versions of BIG are more socialist in spirit. The great Erik Olin Wright’s recent essay “Basic Income as a Socialist Project” is a particularly clear and appealing formulation. Something like my own BIG proposal has been seriously promoted from a variety of ideological locations.

But a good candidate for the historical origin of the proposal is Thomas Paine’s Pamphlet “Agrarian Justice,” published, I believe, in 1796 (that is to say, twenty years after “Common Sense,” five years after “Rights of Man”). In that pamphlet, he proposed “[t]o create a Natural Fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of Fifteen Pounds sterling, as a compensation in part for the loss of his natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property. AND ALSO, The sum of Ten Pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they arrive at that age.”

For an abundance of historical analysis, sociological and economic theory and research, and policy discussions related to BIG, including some of the essays I've mentioned here, and in-depth discussions of everything I have mentioned check out the USBIG website.

Finally, once again, I do want to emphasize that it is the technoprogressive connection of social democracy to emerging peer-to-peer models that interested me most personally in my proposal. I hope to see lots more exploration of these connections from technoprogressives in the coming months. James Hughes has reminded me that Douglas Rushkoff's book Open Source Democracy can be considered an interesting recent contribution to such a conversation.