'Life, Liberty and a Little Bit of Cash'

The Alaska Permanent Fund invests at least a quarter of the state's mineral revenues annually. Depending on the success of those investments, a dividend is paid to each Alaskan—one citizen, one share. The dividend peaked recently at nearly $2,000—that's $8,000 extra a year in the pockets of a family of four. Thanks in part to these payouts, Alaska has the smallest gap between the rich and poor in the United States. (Although everyone gets a dividend, the rich lose more of it to taxes than do the poor.)

To speak of a basic income in an age of curtailed public expenditures, thinks McGill University professor and BI—supporter Myron J. Frankman, "seems like dreaming in Technicolor." Yet change often comes faster than we imagine. "No one reading the press or the journals of 1929," writes Carleton University professor Manfred Bienefeld, "could have imagined the arrival of the New Deal in 1933 in the United States." In the end, opposition to basic income stems more from a paucity of imagination than of means. In the referendum that gave birth to the Alaska Permanent Fund, about a third of Alaskans voted against it; if the vote were held again today, almost no one would oppose it. Whether we decide that a basic income is the right thing to do, the best thing to do, or the only thing to do, it seems likely that the freewheeling imagination that inspires Jay Hammond and Eduardo Suplicy will eventually work its way into the rest of us.