Tom Athanasiou review

This will probably sound wrong, but Peter Barnes’ new book, With Liberty and Dividends for All, is surprisingly good.  It presents as a kind of wonky little instructional book – and I suppose it is – but it’s thoughtful, and it draws big and relevant conclusions, and it’s very good on the power of ideas.  And its ideas are good and useful ones, especially now that neoliberalism has been dragged into the lights so that we can all finally see its twisted, death-wish logic.  If you’ve ever wondered if there might be something really big at the core of the Cap and Dividend proposal — like, say, if there’s a link between emergency climate mobilization and proposals for guaranteed national incomes, or if “pre-distribution” is actually a real thing — then this little volume is for you.

The basic idea here is that the natural and social matrix within which we live is thick with all sorts of common resources, which the neoliberals would love to privatize but which should instead be treated as “co-owned wealth.”  And though Barnes is as much a climate hawk as any of us, he’s not just interested in the global carbon sink.  He’s thinking, too, about the electromagnetic spectrum, and oil and mineral extraction rights, and a whole lot more besides.  And his goal is to create a “dividend society” in which everyone — even your right-wing Uncle Bob — has a vested interest in the protection on the greater world.

So read this book.  And when you do, keep something in mind – Cap and Dividend will not work at the global level, this for a lot of reasons that I’m not going to get into right now.  But at the national level, in a world where we desperately need good ideas about the “adjacent possible,” it may well have a pretty solid role to play.  And this is now the book on the subject.