Renewed interest in a guaranteed income is evident from the number of books that have been published on the topic in the 1990s. This paper discusses and compares seven of those books: Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform, edited by Philippe Van Parijs; Real Freedom...

One person's public good is another's public bad and so, perhaps, the public goods problem could be more generally described as the public commodities problem, in which disagreement about the basic goal of a spending program complicates the decision of how much to spend to achieve that goal....