The Minimum Income in the Res Publica

Since April 2019, citizen's income has been in operation in Italy, a social security and welfare instrument that offers non-taxable economic support to all citizens who are below the poverty line (income below €780 per month).

In Europe, the minimum income is paid in different forms both by many member states of the E.U. and by others that are not part of it. Only Greece and Hungary have not implemented income support measures to combat poverty.

1. Thomas Paine

Since the postwar period, the UN has put some pieces in favour of this monetary policy with the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966 (still in force), where it established the right to "freedom from hunger" and a sufficiently high standard of living to be able to support themselves and their families;at the same time, art. 34 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union recognizes the right to assistance, in order to fight social exclusion and poverty. For the Austrian economist and sociologist Friedrich von Hayken, the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, the universal minimum income would be the instrument to protect these rights, as well as the protection of order within societies, which is always affected by the presence of sections of the population below the subsistence threshold.

In modern times all the measures used and the socio-economic debates on the subject find as historical point of origin the publication Agrarian Justice, carried out in 1795 by the British Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Paine to solve the problem of the misery of revolutionary France: in the text he proposed the creation of a monetary fund through the allocation of a substantial sum to each individual at the age of majority, followed by an annual payment from the age of 50. The author considered the distance between citizens and landowners of the time unjust, thinking that the government should create a basic income.

It is still clear the existential difference between wealthy and marginalized individuals, despite the globalization of markets and technical innovations have revolutionized production methods centuries old....

1. the Roman Senate depicted in the work "Cicero denounces Catilina" by Cesare Maccari (1880)

...For 500 years Rome lived its period of republican oligarchy, a long intermediate phase between the royal and the imperial periods, the latter beginning with Octavian Augustus in 27 BC.

The administrative and executive nucleus of the Res Publica was the Senate, formed by patrician senators to whom the Consul was head.

At the time of the first clashes with the Carthaginians, Rome was interested in controlling the agricultural wealth of Sicily, so as to open new food markets and relieve the growing social and demographic pressure, since as a small city-state was quickly transforming itself into the hegemonic power of the entire Italian peninsula.130 years later the Roman territories were a complex system of provinces stretching from Spain to North Africa, from Greece to Asia Minor.The administrative difficulty in such a context affected numerous fringes of population scattered throughout Italy, especially small landowners, who fell into poverty because of the continuous recruitment due to the numerous wars, and the progressive pressure of the great patrician owners, who bought new funds and monopolized trade.

3. the practicians in the Ancient Rome

By virtue of this the tribune of the plebs Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus proposed in 133 B.C. an agrarian reform that provided for a new redistribution established by a college, granting the excess lands to the less well-off, so as to growl the middle classlow, without which it would have been impossible to maintain the skeleton of the society that was the army. Tiberius never finished his reforms, hindered (and then assassinated) by the consular aristocracy which defended its interests; however, eight years later, his brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus was elected tribune of the plebs, who took up these policies and exacerbated them even more against the aristocratic class, so much so as to obtain from the council of plebs in 123 B.C. the Lex Frumentaria: with this legislative measure, the coffers of the State were responsible for the purchase of large quantities of wheat from Sicily and its transport to the port of ancient Ostia; the wheat was cyclically sold at very low prices to all citizens less affluent.

4. Gracco brothers

The highest point was reached in 58 B.C. with the promulgation of the Lex Clodia Frumentaria, on the proposal of the tribune Publius Clodius Pulcro, a patrician very close to the plebeian fringe: with this new law the wheat distributed was granted free to the poorest, and the number of rightholders was enlarged, guaranteeing to Clodius the unconditional support of the urban plebs. The result of the law was a general improvement in welfare and the possibility for the servitude to access a status of autonomy.

This was perhaps one of the first examples of universal income in history. It demonstrated the functioning of a society founded on egalitarian rights, especially bearing in mind the difficulty of the historical context, marked by continuous conflicts and civil wars.