The difficulty of returning to (near) full employment and especially the high incidence of unemployment at the bottom side of the labour market these days, has inspired economists to make various policy proposals. Almost all measures actually applied maintain or even intensify the conditional nature of social security arrangements. The implementation of a substantial basic income (BI) would engender a major shift in social and economic policy. Even if the BI proposal proves to be economically feasible and sustainable, it would nevertheless not be a serious alternative to present social security systems as long as some popular objections against the proposal cannot be refuted or attenuated. In this chapter, the BI proposal has been confronted with the demands of self-reliance (self-maintenance, self-support, independence), reciprocity and the perfectionist and neutral work ethic.
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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Public Economics with number
0302007.