A Universal Basic Income (UBI), also known as Citizen's Income, Basic Income Guarantee, or Universal Demogrant, is a proposed social welfare program in which the state pays every legal resident within its territory a periodic sum of money. Most proposals have variations for age, but have no other conditions; people would receive the same amount regardless of their employment status, contributions to society, existing salary, net worth, current expenses, gender, family structures, race, religion, or any other factors.[1] Depending on the amount being paid, a basic income may be full or partial.
Basic income was first proposed by Sir Thomas More in the early 16th century[2], but did not receive much further attention until Thomas Spence, Thomas Paine, and Marquis de Condorcet argued for such a welfare system in the late 18th century.[3] The idea resurfaced again during and after the Progressive Era, but related welfare systems such as means-tested programs, negative income taxes, minimum income guarantees, and family allowances were tried instead.[4] Since the 1980s, policy advocates have given more focus to basic income, especially in Europe.[5,6] The proposal has gained traction in recent years due to concerns over structural unemployment caused by automation and artificial intelligence, and experiments with basic income programs are being proposed and conducted in several countries.[7,8,9]
Supporters of UBI generally believe that the basic means of subsistence should be guaranteed as a positive human right in advanced societies, and that UBI can provide this better than extant welfare programs. But there are reasons to support UBI which are quite different from what most of its proponents believe. Let us explore these and see why one could agree with statists for the wrong reasons.
One criticism of welfare programs is that they are dysgenic; they subsidize the survival and reproduction of the unfit at the expense of their Darwinian betters. But any effort to combat dysgenics must begin with figuring out who the dysgenic people are. UBI does this in a way that no other welfare program does. It gives equal amounts of money to people, and the spending habits of the recipients can be studied. The overall process is the closest thing to a controlled experiment that can be performed in economics. The results will show who is beyond help due to poor decision-making, such as spending their entire basic income payment on vices. From there, the least intelligent members of a society can be dealt with through a variety of means. A 2014 World Bank review of studies shows that relatively few people who receive UBI will squander it in such ways[10], suggesting that only the worst people would be spotlighted as unfit. Of course, this would mean that UBI is only a transitory step toward something else, but so is every other government program on a sufficiently long timescale.
Second, critics of UBI cite the fiscal impracticalities of implementing it. In the United States at the time of this writing, current population figures mean that implementing a proposed[11] $1000 per month UBI would cost almost $4 trillion annually, which is roughly equal to the entire current expenditures of the federal government.[12] Effectively doubling government spending seems illibertarian at face value, but let us examine the matter more closely. Any reduction in government spending will be strongly felt by those who receive the funds, while the expenses of taxation and inflation are diffused throughout a society. This perverse incentive structure produces ever greater rent-seeking behavior on the part of special interest groups. Furthermore, attempting to reduce spending on welfare programs, as libertarians would advise, is politically impossible in a democracy. Such efforts will only get one branded evil, selfish, heartless, racist, sexist, and all the rest of the Great Progressive Litany Of Not An Argument. The alternative course is to accelerate government spending in order to hasten the inevitable collapse. Implementing a generous UBI would accomplish this.
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