Basic Income Earth Network

“ I once happened to be dining with the Cardinal when a certain English lawyer was there. I forgot how the subject came up, but he was speaking with great enthusiasm about the stern measures that were then being taken against thieves. ‘We’re hanging them all over the place’, he said. ‘I’ve seen as many as twenty on a single gallows. And that’s what I find so odd. Considering how few of them get away with it, how come we are still plagued with so many robbers?’ ‘What’s odd about it?’, I asked – for I never hesitated to speak freely in front of the Cardinal. ‘This method of dealing with thieves is both unjust and undesirable. As a punishment, it’s too severe, and as a deterrent, it’s quite ineffective. Petty larceny isn’t bad enough to deserve the death penalty. And no penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it’s their only way of getting food. In this respect, you English, like most other nations, remind me of these incompetent schoolmasters, who prefer caning their pupils to teaching them. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse. ” Contrary to the fanciful description of Utopia’s institutions, this passage can be understood as reflecting More’s own views. But nothing in it indicates that the means of livelihood ( proventus vitae ) are meant to be provided through publicly-funded benefits, let alone to everyone. And a later passage rather suggests that a rise in economic activity will do the trick. At two junctures, Vives anticipates some insights that will drive later thinkers in the direction of a Basic Income. “ All these things God created, He put them in our large home, the world, without surrounding them with walls and gates, so that they would be common to all His children. ” Hence, unless he helps those in need, whoever has appropriated some of the gifts of nature “ is only a thief condemned by natural law, because he occupies and keeps what nature has not created exclusively for himself ”. Further, Vives insists that relief should come “ before need induces some mad or wicked action, before the face of the needy blushes from shame… The benefaction that precedes the hard and thankless necessity of asking is more pleasant and more worthy of thanks ”. But he explicitly discards the more radical conclusion that it would be even better if “ the gift were made before the need arose ”, which is exactly what an adequate Basic Income would achieve. Vives’s plea most probably inspired a scheme put into place a few years later by the Flemish municipality of Ypres. It also contributed to inspiring incipient thinking and action about forms of poor relief, from the School of Salamanca of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto (from 1536 onwards) to England’s Poor Laws (from 1576 onwards). Less well remembered than his friends and protectors Erasmus and More, Vives’s pioneering thinking on the welfare state has been recently rediscovered. He is also still remembered in his Alma Mater, the University of Louvain: A stone from his house has been incorporated in the wall of the “Universitaire Halle”, which houses the rectorate in the old town of Leuven. And the meeting room of the Hoover Chair in the new town of Louvain-la-Neuve, where the Collectif Charles Fourier met in 1984-86 to discuss Basic Income and organise the founding meeting of the Basic Income European Network, has been named “Salle Vives”. Vives’s tract is the first systematic expression of a long tradition of social thinking and institutional reform focused on the public exercise of compassion through government-organised means-tested schemes directed at the poor. Despite the difficulties and doubts aroused by the operation of the Poor Laws, the thinkers of the nouveau régime made public assistance an essential function of the government. Thus, Montesquieu in L’Esprit de