Name: UBIE Conference: Four arguments for a eurodividend (Ph Van Parijs)
Uploaded: 2018-11-29T08:26:36.000Z
Duration: 15 min 52 s
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I would like to introduce the first of our two speakers in this session

this is a person who was one of the founding members

which is now the Basic Income Earth Network made back in 1986

and who wrote the book "Real Freedom For All —

What (if Anything) Can Justify Capitalism?"

turns out it's only basic income can do it.

he is also professor at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve

and he is seated to my right, his name is Philippe Van Parijs.

(Philippe Van Parijs): In order to move forward

A vision of the future that is both desirable and feasible.

Desirable in the sense that it can be defended in front of everyone

not just on the basis of our specific tastes or interests

and feasible in the sense of sustainable all things considered —

not in the sense of politically feasible, here and now.

In order to make the vision of the future feasible, we need opportunism.

and we won't seize these opportunities without a close collaboration between two sorts of people.

on the one hand, those I call the "botteurs de culs" — the buttkickers

and on the other hand the "bricoleur" — the thinkers or the fiddlers.

So we need two things : vision and opportunism

and to seize the opportunities we need two categories of people.

First, militants who push forward possibly with unrealistic proposals but driven by a sense of injustice

and on the other hand the people think about how to modify the system

to find the little crevices, the little spots where movement, where progress could be the introduced.

Of course most of these opportunities today can only be seized

where most of the action is, in terms of social policy, which is at national level.

And that`s the level at which most of the meaningful, concrete debates need to take place.

For example the debate alluded to several times this morning about the partial basic income.

The discussion is not a discussion between partial basic income and full basic income.

I personally I'm in favor, including as argued in that book

in favor of the highest sustainable basic income on a scale that is largest politically imaginable.

but meaningful discussion is not about  partial basic income vs. full basic income.

The meaningful discussion as already hinted at by several today is between, say,

the next step consisting in a partial basic income versus the one proposed by Ronald (Blaschke)

consisting in sort of a full basic income for children and young people

and keeping things as there are for all the others

or as proposed by the European Anti-Poverty Network: an adequate generous minimum income

that would remain family-related and means-tested.

These are discussions which need to be conducted in each particular context

and the answer that is appropriate say for Germany

is not necessarily the one that's most appropriate for Greece

where there may be more urgent things to do than

say a partial basic income or basic income for children

and not the same as in Brazil or Ireland etc. etc.

But what I want to talk about today briefly is something that can be done

and that should be done in my view at a level of power that has emerged in matters of social policy only recently

and it is therefore something that this particularly relevant for the new network that is about to be born.

I tested the idea at the BIEN congress in Munich nearly two years ago

and then I published a short paper presenting the idea under the title "The Eurodividend"

a small paper that has then subsequently been translated into a number of languages.

I propose the introduction of the basic income

as an income that is strictly individual, unconditional, universal

and funded essentially by VAT (value-Added Tax) of 19% which is about 10% of European GDP.

Why do I propose that? For 4 reasons which I'll quickly sketch.

The first reason, in a sense that the opportunity that is being created, is the sustainability

Before the euro was born economists, in particular American economists said:

"You are crazy Europeans! This is never going to work!

despite the great differences between the states in their economic development and economic fate,

it works because we have  two powerful stabilizing mechanisms.

and the other one is transfers across states, organized at the federal level.

Migration is about six times higher between states in the United States

than it is today between the member states of the European Union.

And transfers across states - depending on how they are monitored

are between 20 and 40 times larger in the US than in the EU.

So the American economists from the left to the right,

from Milton Friedman to Amartya Sen were warning:

You are crazy! This is never going to work!

And in Europe people said:  "mind your own business!"

You don't want the Euro to compete with the dollar,

you want to keep using the dollar as the only major reserve currency in the world

and you try to prevent us from doing what's in our interest.

Now of course people have more hearing for that

and realized that something needs to be done, that something like a stabiliser is needed.

Now the stabilizer we will realize in Europe

will never be migration to the same extent as in the US

for one main reason, not the only one, which is that we have so many different native tongues

and therefore migrating from says, Athens to Munich, is quite a different experience though the distance is not larger,

quite a different experience from migrating from Detroit to Austin, Texas.

So we need the other mechanism absolutely indispensable for the stabilisation of the euro :

And that other mecanism is  (financial) transfers across member states.

and the form it should take,  if it is to be generous and sustainable,

is not the form of "Finanzausgleich" — that is of a transfer from one state to another one

but it should take the form of "Soziale Sicherheit" — a form of interpersonal transfer across the borders,

something of course that has never happened in the history of mankind

but which is indispensable for the survival of the eurozone.

Argument number two says: well, we don't only need migration, interstate migration

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