Relationship between UBI and public and social infrastructure and services from emancipatory point of view
- Public and social infrastructure and services can be public institutions of education, culture, child, elder and health care, water, electricity, transport and mobility, security and so on. Public and social infrastructure and services are unconditional and universal to all individuals only, if cost-free accessible – Unconditional Basic Services (UBS). The principles of the Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) and of the UBS are the same: unconditional, universal to all individuals, high enough respective sufficient to ensure material existence and enable participation in the society.
- In the case of UBS the amount of the UBI has to cover all goods and services for which people still have to pay money to ensure their material existence and participation in society too.
- Regarding relative poverty line: In the case of UBS the general income taxes could increase to finance the public infrastructure and services, so the level of the relative poverty line could decrease a little bit (because the relative poverty line ist a net height), the amount of UBI too.[1]
But in any case, the UBI must have an amount above the relative poverty line of the country in order to eradicate income poverty and minimise income and social inequality in a sustainable way in the country concerned – whether with or without UBS, and also regardless of how the UBS is financed.
The amount of UBI has to cover all goods and services for which people still have to pay money to ensure their material existence and participation in society too (see chapter 2). - A democratic organising of public and social infrastructure and services is necessary to promote an ecological and emancipatory type of public and social infrastructure and services.
Only this way paternalistic, anti-emancipatory and unecological infrastructur and services can be prevented. This is one of the lessons of the collapse of “socialist” societies.
Summary:
Public and social infrastructure and services are only emancipatory in the case of unconditionally and universally to all individuals, i. e. cost-free, access to them and in the case of the democratical organising and controlling of UBS.
The Unconditional Basic Income is only emancipatory in the case of an amount which ensured everyone the material existence and participation in society, in the case of an amount above the relative poverty line of the country concerned and in the case of the democratical organising and controlling of UBI.
[1] In the case of financing of UBIs via higher taxes of high(est) income, wealth, finance transaction and so on the level of the relative poverty line would not decrease.