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Marx objected to the 19th-century Speenhamland revision to the Elizabethan Poor Laws—which was a top-up grant regardless of income—because it would incentivize employers to lower wages, and Marxists are big believers in labor (versus leisure or capital) as the source of economic value.
Interest in a guaranteed income arose in the 1960s wave of “cybernetics” (man-plus-machine automation) and the debate over whether the modern economy was evolving from labor to leisure and away from full employment. It has re-emerged in this era of artificial intelligence and robotics in the grander-sounding “universal basic income” (UBI) which risks metastasizing […]
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