Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Many private institutions, such as universities and museums, have large and growing endowments. Why doesn’t the government have one? Simply, we have failed to take advantage of enormous opportunities to create one. This paper argues that governments should start to build up a permanent endowment of publicly held assets, both financial and physical, lease at least some of them out to private industry, and use the revenue for two purposes: half for government spending and the other half for a dividend in the form of an unconditional basic income for all people—in recognition of their shared ownership of their common …

This article is a spin-off of my book project (with Grant McCall), "Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy." This article makes the following points. Most justifications of government using social contact theory (contractarianism) require a claim we call, “the Hobbesian hypothesis,” which we define as the claim that all people are better off under state authority than they would be outside of it. The Hobbesian hypothesis is an empirical claim about all stateless societies. Many small-scale societies are stateless. Anthropological evidence from the smallest-scale human societies provides sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the hypothesis, if not to reject …