Renewed interest in a guaranteed income is evident from the number of books that have been published on the topic in the 1990s. This paper discusses and compares seven of those books: Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform, edited by Philippe Van Parijs; Real Freedom...

One person's public good is another's public bad and so, perhaps, the public goods problem could be more generally described as the public commodities problem, in which disagreement about the basic goal of a spending program complicates the decision of how much to spend to achieve that goal....

The public choice literature has paid little attention to altruism, and the few works that do deal with it usually focus on the tradeoff between selfish and unselfish preferences, assuming some shared set of unselfish preferences. This focus leaves the question open as to whether unselfish but...

This paper argues that a guaranteed income is not only consistent with the principle of reciprocity but is required for reciprocity. This conclusion follows from a three-part argument. First, if a guaranteed income is in place, all individuals have the same opportunity to live without working....

Renewed interest in a guaranteed income is evident from the number of books that have been published on the topic in the 1990s. This paper discusses and compares seven of those books: Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform, edited by Philippe Van Parijs; Real Freedom...

The decision about how much to spend on a public program depends on the answers to two questions: (1) a normative and binary question-Should the government pursue the goal of this program? (2) a positive and continuous question-Given that the program's goal should be adopted, what is the optimal...

This paper uses what could be called a multi-school approach to poverty policy, asking the following question: Given the many proposed causes for poverty, and the conflicting theories about how potential solutions would work, what conclusions can we draw about policy? This paper concludes that...

Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income argues that philosophers have focused too much on scalar freedom and proposes a theory of status freedom as effective control self-ownership: the power to have or refuse active cooperation with other willing people, or simply: freedom as the power...