ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that F. A. Hayek’s lifelong support for basic income, rather than being a fluke or an exception to his free market commitments, rested on Hayek’s neo-republican understanding of freedom as the absence of coercion. It also argues that individuals have natural rights that public officials ought to protect. The book proposes basic income as a way to compensate individuals for the state’s violating of their rights. It shows that egalitarian theories of justice, including the relational forms of egalitarianism advanced by Elizabeth Anderson and Samuel Scheffler, struggle to justify basic income. The book considers how liberal and communitarian thinkers have approached “intimate labor,” “work that is done primarily by women with intimate parts of their bodies or their intimate physical capacities in exchange for money, favors, or goods,” including sex work and reproductive labor such as commercial surrogacy.
