Why you should support Universal Basic Income

“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” — Martin Luther King

“Some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and capacity to work, can be assured to everybody.” — Friedrich Hayek

At its heart, the idea of Basic Income is as old as humanity: the strongest and luckiest hunters and gatherers shared with members of the clan who were not as strong or lucky. Support for Universal Basic Income comes from conservatives like Hayek and socialists like King.

The first great capitalist theorist supported Basic Income:

“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich…. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Every group and every person in poverty has a different reason for being there, but the solution is the same for everyone: Universal Basic Income. It has many names — Guaranteed Income, Freedom Dividend, Citizens Basic Income — and could be called Living Insurance because it guarantees that everyone who experiences economic hard times will have the support they need.

Basic Income is not welfare. It’s money every citizen gets simply for being a citizen. Alaska has been doing something like Basic Income for decades — every Alaskan gets a payment from the Alaska Permanent Fund. Native American tribes with casinos do something similar — every tribe member gets part of the profit.

Reasons for Basic Income

End poverty.

End crimes of desperation associated with poverty.

Help students study fulltime.

Help mothers — the greatest reason for abortion is financial worry.

Help people who want to start new businesses by guaranteeing they won’t be homeless if they fail. (If you doubt the logic, see Why Does Sweden Have So Many Start-Ups?)

Make sure we all have the means for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. An article about Canada’s Mincome test of Basic Income, This City Eliminated Poverty, And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It, provides an example:

One woman called to say she remembered the Mincome project. In the early 1970s, she was a single mother raising two girls on welfare… She said she had always been treated respectfully, but there was one thing case workers said that bothered her.

“She said she wanted to get some job training. They told her to go home and take care of her kids and they would take care of her,” explained Forget.

When the opportunity to transfer from [welfare] to Mincome came along, the woman took it. With no restrictions on how she could spend the money she was given, she signed up for training and got a part-time job at the local library which eventually became a full-time career.

How does Basic Income work?

In the simplest form of Basic Income, the government sends money each month to every adult citizen. The amount is tied to the poverty level so it changes as the poverty level changes. Because it goes to everyone, it is as simple to administer as sending out social security and tax refunds.

Providing more details about how it might be done is hard because there are many ways to do Basic Income. Should we abolish all traditional government aid and set a high dollar amount—say $3500 a month or more? Or should we set a low figure of $1000 a month or so and also provide the rest of what people need in the form of universal health care and free higher education?

As for how to pay it, if you search the web, you’ll find many proposals. I suspect we’ll end up with a combination of them.

Should Basic Income have a work requirement?

Work requirements require bureaucracies to test and monitor people. That would make Basic Income more expensive and would only benefit the administrators.

Wouldn’t people have less incentive to work?

“Will a guaranteed annual wage kill incentive among the poor? If a man is given a certain amount of security, won’t he quit working? Exactly the same contention could be made about the sons of the wealthy who are left large fortunes. Yet the evidence suggests that, given economic freedom, people will generally choose to do that which interests them most. It is up to society to see that these interests are widened and that too requires investment.” — Pierre Berton

No test of Basic Income has found that people other than students and young mothers stop working. Unlike traditional forms of welfare, Basic Income doesn’t create incentives to stop working because you get Basic Income no matter how much money you make. Basic Income encourages people to work — they know their basic needs are covered so their work will go to making their lives even better.

Wouldn’t people have less incentive to be creative?

From Cash or Copyright or Real Creativity? | naked capitalism:

…A series of studies by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan Teresa Amabile, and others, have shown that primary school kids don’t learn to read if they’re paid to, artists produce their worst work when they’re commissioned to produce it, and people get worse at solving puzzles if you reward them for successful solutions.

The reason for this? Creativity is closely linked to motivation, and humans become creative when they’re internally motivated by curiosity or interest or desire. They get demotivated — and less creative — when you introduce money into the equation.

If you want people to be creative, free them to create by providing Basic income.

If Basic Income is a great idea, why do some people oppose it?

“The fact is that most men are still geared psychologically to the economic facts of scarcity, when the industrial world is in the process of entering a new era of economic abundance. But because of this psychological ‘lag’ many people cannot even understand new ideas presented in the concept of a guaranteed income, because traditional ideas are usually determined by feelings that originated in previous forms of social existence.” — Eric Fromm, The Psychological Aspects of the Guaranteed Income, a chapter in the book ‘The Guaranteed Income’ edited by Robert Theobald, 1967

Why should business owners support Basic Income?

Workers who are not desperate are happier and more productive.

How would Basic Income affect housing?

Landlords would know what tenants could afford.

Bankers would know the same about people applying for mortgages.

Cheaper neighborhoods would become more desirable because they would not suffer from the crime and blight associated with poverty.

Would Basic Income administrators become corrupt?

At reddit, Indon Dasani noted,

You know what part of the US government has very little problem with corruption? The Social Security Administration. You know what part of the US government is rife with corruption despite there being far less money passing through it? The Department of Defense. Basic Income is less prone to corruption than the average government program, because it’s simple, easily trackable, and it goes straight into people’s pockets already. Stealing that money is magnitudes more difficult than getting a defense contract that doesn’t do anything useful, because someone’s probably going to notice they’re not getting money anymore.

Do most people support Basic Income?

Support is growing for a universal basic income — and rightly so

Most Americans Support Guaranteed Income. Here’s How We Are Working as Mayors to Make It a Reality

Poll: 67 Percent Support Universal Basic Income

Why Conservatives and Right-Libertarians should support Basic Income

F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is a favorite text of conservatives and right-libertarians. It may be the reason a surprising number of conservatives support Basic Income.

Hayek wrote:

…there are two kinds of security: the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all and the security of a given standard of life, of the relative position which one person or group enjoys compared with others.

There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.

Hayek’s distinction of two kinds of security shows why Basic Income is not a socialist plan, even though many socialists support Basic Income as a practical way to help people in a capitalist society. Basic Income is only meant to end poverty and thereby end economic desperation and all the troubles that come with it.

Why Socialists Should Support Basic Income

Socialists who object to anything that is not pure socialism — like Basic Income, which is a capitalist solution to poverty that leaves capitalists in possession of most of the world’s wealth—haven’t thought of something that was obvious to Karl Marx’s daughter:

“…has not the Communist Manifesto taught us that it is our duty to support any progressive movement that benefits the workers’ cause, even if this movement is not our own?” — Eleanor Marx

Basic Income is a program like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP, aka Food Stamps. You have to hate the working class to oppose programs that help them.

Recommended:

A $1,000 per month cash handout would grow the economy by $2.5 trillion, new study says

What billionaires and business titans say about cash handouts in 2017 (Hint: lots!)

Eleven Nobel Laureates Who Have Endorsed Universal Basic Income