Why has Basic Income not been implemented?
Throughout the many articles, books and Basic Income websites represented at this site runs a thread of argument about the notion that people resent others from ‘getting something for nothing’. It is a form of downward envy. Philippe Van Parijs (2000) put the issue succinctly in Basic Income and the Two Dilemmas of the Welfare State: ‘the indignation of the jobless who are morally and legally expected to keep looking for what many know they will never find, is matched by the outrage of those who subsidize with their social security contributions the idleness of people who are overtly transgressing the rules of the game’.
