The social branch: A new mechanism for economic justice

Abstract

"The neoliberal policies activated since the 1970s have created unprecedented levels of wealth and income inequality, stagnating social mobility, aggravating effects that compound the climate crisis, and especially little prospects for an improvement of the general welfare of all citizens, not just the ruling wealthy. Many theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to fix the ailments of capitalism, Universal Basic Income (UBI) being amongst the most transformative and cutting-edge. These policy proposals all suffer a great shortcoming: they must be political. Leftwing and rightwing governments take turns at running UBI pilots then cutting them immediately after winning elections (Forget, 2018). The challenge to a solid long-term solution that brings economic justice for the many, not just the few, is to overcome the politics. This means deploying broad-spectrum and reasonable (re)distribution models that satisfy both the laissez-faire desires of the libertarian enthusiasts and the sentiments of solidarity of left-leaning activists. A transformative (re)distribution paradigm must become apolitical and must transcend the traditional separations of power in the state. This paper outlines the high-level attributes of this new mechanism: what it would look like, why it is so necessary, and how can be realized given the tremendous pressures imposed by the climate crisis.