Grillo’s “more money for everyone” and Boccaccio’s town of Bengodi
Michael the Great's Notepad
Maso was asked by Calandrin where these virtuous stones were located. Maso replied that most were in Berlinzone, land of the Basques, in a district called Bengodi, in which no one worked, since the prince guaranteed a basic income and the bankers minted and loaned free dinar for any need; and there was a whole mountain of grated Parmesan cheese, on top of which were people who did nothing else than make macaroni and ravioli and cook them in capon broth, and then they threw them down, and whoever took the more had more.
(Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, "Calandrino and helitropy", third novella of the eighth day)
He's back on the streets in Rome. And the scene resumed, in the presence of an embarrassed Elly Schlein and an interdicted Giuseppe Conte. Proposing the formation of brigades of hooded young people who repair the flower beds and fill the potholes at night. But, alongside this folkloric two of spades, Beppe Grillo has also put a three of trumps on the table: the idea of an unconditional universal income. The only measure, argues the Elevato, capable of countering the apocalyptic technological unemployment induced by the dictatorship of the algorithm. Nothing new under the sun. The news has always aroused fear, on the right and on the left: fear of the factory because it brutalizes the worker; fear of the machine because it alienated his existence; fear of robots because they destroy jobs; and, now, fear of artificial intelligence because it replaces human intelligence. Fears that contradict an elementary truth, stubbornly contested by the neo-Luddites of the third millennium: every industrial revolution involves the birth of new jobs and, in parallel, the transformation of old jobs, often determining their marginalization or disappearance.
Perhaps Grillo, when he thinks of the future of work, imagines factories populated only by mechanical arms that move frenetically, or only by "STEM" (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) professionals who become the beating heart of the company. It matters little. What matters is the message: as a result of the complete automation of production processes, the decline of human work is inevitable. In this sense, the citizen's income, brought back to its original meaning, acts both as a universal social shock absorber and as an "aid to innovation". If I no longer have a moral obligation to make people work, I can push technological progress to its final frontier, without worrying too much about "collateral damage".
It is not the discovery of America. Perhaps the less young remember a film by Nanni Loy, "Mi manda Picone" (1982). It tells of the frantic but vain search for a Bagnoli steelworker who disappeared in an ambulance after setting himself on fire in front of the city council. The spectator slowly discovers, through a journey through the mysteries of a Naples that is the transparent metaphor of national vices, that that worker did a thousand different jobs and had many different lives. In other words, his social identity was not clearly defined, but it was ambiguous and elusive, almost elusive. Loy's artistic sensibility had perfectly grasped the changed perception of factory work, now seen as a stopgap and no longer a source of pride. After a decade of extraordinary struggles that had celebrated its centrality, the working class seemed on the path to a historic retreat. As had already been intuited by the cartoonists of Cipputi, the blue overalls challenged by modernity, and of Gasparazzo, the disenchanted proletarian and slacker. It is then that a vast literature on the irreversible decline of work in industrial society begins to flourish. The Marxist scholar Harry Braverman had already predicted it in 1974, when he examined the effects of mass mechanization in the United States. At the beginning of the 1980s, André Gorz, faced with rising unemployment and falling working hours, even decreed the disappearance of the wage-earning society. For his part, the American guru of the Genoese guru, Jeremy Rifkin, wrote in 1995: "Today, for the first time, human labor is systematically eliminated from the production process […]" (The end of work. The decline of force global work and the advent of the post-market era, Baldini & Castoldi).
But, at this point, it is necessary to clarify what the unconditional universal income (“universal basic income” in English) is. It is an income to which all citizens of all ages are entitled, and does not require any proof of means or willingness to work. As such, it adds to any form of pay. If we are not exactly in the district of Bengodi mentioned in the exergue, we are close. Because it is iniquitous, being paid even to the rich. Because it is synonymous with mass parasitism paid by taxpayers. Because it is unsustainable for state coffers. According to Andrea Fumagalli, vice-president of the "Basic Income Network Italia", the total cost of establishing an unconditional universal income in Italy, of an amount at least equal to the relative poverty threshold, would amount to 480 billion euros a year, equivalent to about a quarter of the GDP. Not to mention the risk of galloping inflation, if it were financed by printing money.
Examining its history, the idea of universal basic income is like a karst river: it re-emerges in moments of economic crisis and then sinks in those of greater prosperity. It is advanced for the first time by Thomas More in his Utopia (1516), the island where each inhabitant had to be assured the means of subsistence without the obligation of a job. It is then taken up by the Marquis de Condorcet who, during the French Revolution, had imagined a form of "social insurance" before being sentenced to death. Since then, a long journey between Europe and the United States began, where in 1962 Milton Friedman in his eponymous work, Capitalism and Freedom, formulated the proposal for a negative income tax. Conservatives don't like it, as it is unrelated to the merits and needs of the individual. Nor do those socialists who love the state that paternalistically defines the needs to be satisfied don't like it. Instead, liberals like it, because it is an alternative to the welfare state of Bismarkian inspiration, which is too invasive and therefore illiberal.
Friedman's proposal is quite well known. It is a question of paying an automatic subsidy to all those who have incomes below a certain threshold: a subsidy that decreases as income increases. It is a system -he explains in Capitalism and Freedom- “specifically aimed at solving the problem of poverty. It gives help in the form most useful to individuals, money. It is general and can replace the multitude of special measures in force today. It makes the cost to society explicit.” The Chicago School economist was well aware of the political problem posed by his system, which subtracted resources from the treasury to redeploy them to those who don't work and don't earn enough. In 1980, in Free to choose, Milton and Rose Friedman (his wife) are therefore forced to clarify their thinking. The negative tax mechanism "would provide a guaranteed minimum to all those in conditions of need, regardless of the reasons for their condition, causing the least possible damage to their character, their autonomy, their desire to improve their condition ”. But for it to really work, it would have to replace the current welfare state, in which "some people, the bureaucrats who administer the programs, govern other people's lives."
It is a widespread opinion in the cultural circles of the "left of the least" that the supporters of the market economy are substantially insensitive to the sufferings of the weakest and the poorest. If this is the accusation, it is interesting to reflect on the words of a father of contemporary liberalism, Friedrich A. von Hayek . In Law, legislation and freedom (1982) the Austrian economist argues that many of the comforts capable of making life tolerable in a modern city are provided by the public sector: "Most of the roads […], the setting of , and many other types of information ranging from land registers, maps and statistics, to quality controls of some goods and services". Furthermore, it remains established that demanding respect for the law, defense against external enemies, and the field of foreign relations are activities of the State. Well, for Hayek "few will doubt that only this organization [endowed with coercive powers: the State] can deal with natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, epidemics and so on, and implement measures to prevent or remedy them" . For this reason, it appears quite clear "that the government controls the material means and is substantially free to use them at its own discretion" […]. Then there is a whole other class of risks with respect to which the need for government action has only recently been recognized […]. This is the problem of those who, for various reasons, cannot earn a living in a market economy, such as the sick, the old, the physically and mentally handicapped, widows and orphans – that is, those who suffer from adverse conditions, which can affect anyone and against which many are unable to protect themselves, but which a society which has reached a certain level of well-being can afford to help”.
In other words, only an open and dynamic society which has embraced the "market logic" can afford the achievement of humanitarian ends, and it can afford it because it is relatively rich. Hayek does not limit himself to prescribing an active role of the State, but also tells us the reason: "Ensuring a minimum income for all, or a level below which no one falls when they can no longer fend for themselves, is not only an absolutely legitimate protection against risks common to all, but it is a necessary task of the Great Society in which the individual cannot take revenge on the members of the specific small group into which he was born”[…]. And a system which encourages us to leave the relative security enjoyed by belonging to a restricted group will probably produce strong discontent and violent reactions, when those who have previously enjoyed the benefits find themselves, through no fault of their own, deprived of aid, because they no longer have the ability to earn a living. And this is a decidedly liberal choice: “The basic conception of classical liberalism, which alone can give rise to a decent and impartial government, is that government must regard all people as equal, however unequal they may be in fact; and that however the government restrains (or supports) the action of one person, so it must, under the same abstract rules, restrain (or supports) the actions of all others. No one has a special claim on the government, because they are rich or poor, beyond the guarantee of protection against any violence by anyone and the guarantee of a certain minimum income […]. It is regrettable that the effort to ensure a uniform minimum for all those who cannot provide for themselves has been linked to the quite different aim of ensuring a 'just' distribution of incomes”.
In the same vein as Hayek are three other liberals: Luigi Einaudi, Luigi Sturzo and Wilhelm Röpke. In particular, the former, referring to active policies against poverty, in his Lessons on social policy states that the social legislation of a liberal state must have the strategic objective of "bringing the starting points of individuals as close as possible", according to "the general principle that in a healthy society man should be able to count on the minimum necessary for life". Of course, a minimum that does not turn into a right to idleness, and that “is not a point of arrival but a starting point; an assurance given to all men so that all may develop their aptitudes”. The positions of Hayek and Einaudi, as well as of Sturzo and Röpke, demonstrate that one can be deeply in solidarity without falling into the trade-off between justice and freedom, unlike statist welfarism. In other words, freedom and sociality must not become two opposing concepts, but can be integrated into the conception of a State capable of supporting people, of helping the market to function better, of considering people in their positive potential and not as subjects who must keep silent and obey. They were also the ingenuity of a comedian back on the stage of national politics.
*The paper
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-piu-soldi-per-tutti-di-grillo-e-il-paese-di-bengodi-di-boccaccio/ on Sat, 01 Jul 2023 05:48:28 +0000.