Hasn't Marxism already failed enough to avoid proposing it as a solution to anything?
Didn't communists in the USSR find that when you give everyone a "right" to have all their basic needs met and when you took away their motivation to work hard to succeed, a lot of people decided not to work or they decided to work at things that the community didn't need?
Then, to make up for the fact that there was no reward incentive model, they had to bring in authoritarian force.
The most insightful criticism of communism that I've ever heard was from a bunch of Romanians I know who grew up in a country under control of the Soviets. When they hear Americans or other Westerners espousing pseudo-communism as a solution to society's problems, they get apoplectic. They can't even begin to grasp why a society that has discovered and nurtured capitalism would turn to empirically failed socioeconomic models.
Seriously, if you're going to want to stand on someone's shoulders to move society forward, why Karl Marx's?
"This argument has several problems. I’ll discuss two of them. The first problem with it is that BIG cannot be accurately characterized as something for nothing. All societies impose many rules on every individual. Consider the discussion of homelessness above. Why can’t homeless people build their own shelter and their own latrine? Why can’t they drink out of a clean river? Why can’t they hunt, gather, or plant and harvest their own food? They cannot do these things because the state has made rules saying they don’t have the right to do these things. The state has imposed rules saying that almost all the resources of the Earth belong to someone else. Those of us who benefit from the rules by which our society distributes ownership of the Earth’s natural resources benefit every day from the state’s interference with the propertyless, and we pay them no compensation. A state without BIG is the state that has something for nothing.
BIG is (and should be seen) not as something for nothing but as the just compensation for all the rules of property and property regulations society imposes on individuals."
I think of it as more closely associated with libertarians than Marxists, though I assume American libertarians have since disowned it. Its most prominent 20th-century advocates were Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who viewed it as the most economically efficient way to add a basic safety net to an otherwise un-meddled-with market economy. Marxists generally want a more fundamental change in the economy, not a Hayekian economy, not even a Western-Europe-style social market economy (it would be a surprise to Scandinavians, for example, to find out that they were on the USSR side of the Cold War!).
Friedman wasn't a Basic Income proponent. He was a proponent of negative taxation. He was only interested in being consistent with the way we treat income tax and welfare. He felt that the welfare manager's job of determining exactly how to administer relief to recipients was something that couldn't be done properly. He preferred just giving cash based upon income levels on a sliding scale.
Given the abuse of the Welfare system over the half century since Friedman supported negative taxation, I don't doubt that he would have different views and controls for such a system were he alive today.
A lot of ideas sounded good 50 or 100 years ago that we have tried but have failed. It doesn't mean we should keep trying them.
You're mistaken about Friedman not being for Basic Income. In an interview only 12 years ago, Friedman was asked about basic income as an "alternative" to the negative income tax, and Friedman replied that both were the same thing. Friedman wrote, "A basic or citizen's income is not an alternative to a negative income tax. It is simply another way to introduce a negative income tax if it is accompanied with a positive income tax with no exemption. A basic income of a thousand units with a 20 percent rate on earned income is equivalent to a negative income tax with an exemption of five thousand units and a 20 percent rate below and above five thousand units."
Didn't communists in the USSR find that when you give everyone a "right" to have all their basic needs met and when you took away their motivation to work hard to succeed, a lot of people decided not to work or they decided to work at things that the community didn't need?
Not the way that you assume, no. Huge strawman here.
Didn't communists in the USSR find that when you give everyone a "right" to have all their basic needs met and when you took away their motivation to work hard to succeed, a lot of people decided not to work or they decided to work at things that the community didn't need?
Then, to make up for the fact that there was no reward incentive model, they had to bring in authoritarian force.
The most insightful criticism of communism that I've ever heard was from a bunch of Romanians I know who grew up in a country under control of the Soviets. When they hear Americans or other Westerners espousing pseudo-communism as a solution to society's problems, they get apoplectic. They can't even begin to grasp why a society that has discovered and nurtured capitalism would turn to empirically failed socioeconomic models.
Seriously, if you're going to want to stand on someone's shoulders to move society forward, why Karl Marx's?