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Reading Paine from the Left (2015)

• e12e 6y ago
  There's been a few discussions on hn regarding universal basic income, and I found the points related in the last third of this article quite interesting, and would like to hear how the hn community responds: > This is a universal capital grant, not a basic income. Paine wants to make everyone the owner of productive property. > (...) The ground-rent he proposes would take the form of a 10 percent inheritance tax on all estates. The value of these inheritances, he realizes, includes “what is called personal, as well as . . . landed property,” and there is no clear way of parsing out the two. > Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally. Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came. > “if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labour that produced it; the consequence of which is, that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.” Here Paine sees property to be the result of the exploitation of labor by capital.