The rise and fall of guaranteed income
Chappell pointed to a widely-publicized remark by a protester in 2009 that said, “Take your government hands off my Medicare!”
That rhetoric contrasts starkly with the vision of government that President Johnson put forward in a campaign speech in 1964.
“And when we say as a Nation ‘In God We Trust,’ this doesn’t mean everybody for himself and the devil takes the hindmost,” Johnson said.
“Government is not the end of people,” he continued. “Government, prudent government, responsible government, is the people, and that is what this election is all about, the responsibility of people, acting together, to keep prosperity here at home.”
The widespread support for GAI proposals in the 1960s and 1970s depended on the broadly shared perception that the government existed to serve the interests of citizens.
But, McCluskey said, the sense of the government as being a foreign entity and the sense of the market as being a natural, inviolable force have created the perception that, “no matter how good our intentions are, it would be futile to try and control the market or shape it in any way.”
“That’s an unbelievably disempowering way of thinking,” she added.
Gordon agreed. “That disempowerment is a huge obstacle to proposing something like a guaranteed income today,” she said. “It would require that people admit that the market is failing to produce the best outcomes, and then also to admit that the problem of poverty requires a collective solution. That’s a pretty heavy load.”
Justice for all
In calling for a guaranteed income, advocates in the 1960s and 1970s frequently appealed to the widespread sense that there was something “unjust” about the presence of poverty in a rich society.
For example, the “Freedom Budget” proposed by the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph in 1966 demanded a GAI because of “the inescapable fact that an economy as rich and powerful as ours cannot countenance widespread deprivation, much less widespread poverty.”
“One thought about justice in terms of the broader community,” Daniel Rodgers of Princeton said. “There was a sense that a just society would produce at least a measure of dignity for every member, so one also talked about justice in terms of equality.”
In 1970, Democratic Oklahoma Sen. Fred Harris made an appeal for a GAI by invoking the idea of a community based on justice and equality:
We have been called repeatedly to provide a decent portion of the country’s immense bounty for all her people. As of now we have not answered. We have not yet committed ourselves to this basic human cause which will do more than anything else to eliminate alienation and division from our national community and to narrow the gap between what we say and what we do. Why have we passively accepted a caste of poverty-ridden citizens in the midst of the greatest national wealth in the world’s history?
With the erosion of social thinking and the fragmentation of social bonds, however, that understanding of justice as being rooted in the broader society gave way to an understanding of justice that is more concerned with ensuring that individual members of society are treated fairly.
“Now we think about trying to create a fair process instead of creating just outcomes,” Rodgers said. “We think of justice in terms of [individual] rights and immunities instead of in terms of social obligations.”
What about history and power?
In his State of the Union Address in 1964, President Johnson said that, “Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support.”
But, O’Connor said, the rise of market-based ideology has encouraged the belief that whatever outcomes the market produces are inherently just.
“When you stop considering history and power, then it’s not a small jump to believing that everybody is entering the market on equal footing, and then it’s a small jump to saying that whatever comes out of the market is just,” she said.
In contrast to Johnson, McCluskey said, much of the rhetoric about poverty today is couched squarely in terms of individual responsibility. In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2008, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney invoked the “culture of dependency” that he perceived as arising from the social ethos of the 1960s.
“In the 1960s, there were welfare programs that created a culture of poverty in our country,” Romney said. He then went on to contrast his own view on the solution to poverty, which is framed squarely as an individual solution.
“Now, some people think we won that battle when we reformed welfare,” Romney said. “But the liberals haven’t given up. At every turn, they tried to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility.”
But advocates for “government largesse,” like the GAI advocates of the 1960s and 1970s, were not, according to Jason Murphy of Elms College, developing a newfangled “culture of dependency.” The belief that pronounced inequality is not reflective of a just society — and that there is a societal imperative to reduce it — is “an idea that goes back a long way in American political thought,” Murphy said. “It’s only in the last 30 years or so that we seem to have forgotten it.”