a growing 'precariat', consisting of millions of people facing unstable, insecure labour, a lack of occupational identity, declining and increasingly volatile real wages, loss of benefits and chronic indebtedness

This mixture of anxiety, anomie, alienation and anger is creating a 'perfect storm'

The Frankfurt School psychoanalyst Erich Fromm advocated a 'universal subsistence guarantee' in a famous 1955 book, The Sane Society

libertarian paternalism derives from Bentham's 'panopticon', a prison design enabling prisoners to be watched by a guard at all times and their behaviour monitored. Bentham's idea was to give prisoners apparent free choice, while knowing they would be punished if they made the 'wrong' choice.

In the relative sense, the precariat almost certainly loses from growth, because the gains from the sort of growth that is occurring go disproportionately if not entirely to the plutocracy, elite and salariat.

The idea of giving money directly to people to boost growth was put forward in a famous 1969 article by Milton Friedman, who used the parable of scattering dollar bills from a helicopter for the public to pick up. 'Helicopter money'--printing money to distribute to the public--has been proposed by American bond investor Bill Gross and by the economics journalist Martin Wolf, among others.

A libertarian might regard that quasi-Darwinian prospect with equanimity; the rest of us might not.

they should oppose the many other forms of 'rentier' income derived solely from possession of assets