Agreeing With Statists For The Wrong Reasons: Universal Basic Income

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.

Given economic realities, it is far more practical for UBI to replace some or all of current welfare spending.[13] Again, repealing welfare without replacing it is a political non-starter, so it is necessary to consider replacement. UBI is not means-tested or contingent upon any factors which must be examined, so the need for a bloated welfare administration is eliminated.[14] Lisa Westerveld, a councilor for the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, estimates that £15 million of their £88 million annual welfare budget could be saved by implementing UBI there.[15] It is important to remember that welfare does not solely consist of handouts, but also of make-work programs and bloated bureaucracies that introduce artificial inefficiency to the state apparatus and the broader economy. Cutting these programs and government jobs should be a welcome development to any libertarian.

Another effect of providing free money unconditionally is that people will have less need to work for a living. Less work means less tax revenue, which in turn means less funding for government programs.[16] This is good because it will force formerly public projects to be created and maintained privately, thus subjecting them to market accountability. Alternatively, the state may run larger deficits or inflate its currency, but these measures will eventually cause it to cut spending out of necessity when interest rates rise and creditors become nervous about a sovereign default. Meanwhile, once people have a basic subsistence without work, many unskilled jobs that are ripe for automation would have to be automated quickly, as businesses and governments would no longer be able to find workers to fill those jobs. This would greatly increase efficiency.

One must also consider who would be impacted by such changes. The government jobs that would be eliminated by UBI implementation in Western countries are disproportionately held by racial minorities, while basic income would give an advantage to poor whites. Because democracies incentivize people to vote themselves money from the public treasury, UBI would reverse the political vote-buying of the current welfare system in the short-term while curbing the practice in the long-term. The anti-white racism of the progressive political establishment would be further exposed when they oppose a transition to UBI, as they would have to go on record as wanting to give handouts to everyone except poor whites. Right-wing parties could therefore expect a boost at the polls if they embrace UBI.

Critics of UBI will point to likely price inflation, as increasing the total amount of money in consumer hands would reduce its unit value by reducing its scarcity. There is also the matter that funding such a program will likely come from raising taxes on businesses[11], which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices like any other business expense. But this provides an opportunity for people to buy precious metals and cryptocurrencies as a hedge against inflation. This could help cryptocurrency gain more widespread adoption and further weaken the fiat currency that is used for handing out the UBI, adding to the acceleration effect on government spending and inflation when people advocate for a larger UBI to combat inflation. (This represents the other end of the intelligence spectrum from the dysgenics discussed earlier. UBI also shows us who the smartest people are, as they would use the fiat money to exchange for something more sound.)

Some feminists oppose UBI because it might serve to reinforce traditional gender roles by incentivizing women to stay out of the workforce.[17,18] But this actually leads to a set of reasons to support UBI. If mothers are at home raising their children, then children will receive better care than they would from strangers. Money saved on childcare could be kept within the family to provide for the children or help the family unit in other ways, while those providing childcare would be freed up to do something more directly productive. Renewed dependence on male breadwinners to provide for the family beyond the level that UBI allows would strengthen family cohesion and lessen divorce rates. At work, the restored male super-majority would improve workplace social dynamics.[19] Women cannot be sexually harassed or discriminated against at work if they are not at work, and social justice warriors would have a harder time operating against a revitalized männerbund. The male social bonds that develop at work would soon extend to society at large, helping to restore a proper patriarchy.

UBI can also help to stem the tide of demographic replacement in Western countries. A direct money transfer to poor whites would raise their fertility rates, resulting in less need and room for foreign labor, but it would also encourage a solidarity among all citizens. Let us consider Native American tribes that make money from casinos and other tourist traps. These funds are distributed to tribe members, which gives all recipients a monetary incentive to place strict limitations on tribal membership and reservation residency in order to increase the share for all who remain. Otherwise, people would be incentivized to move to reservations and join tribes in order to receive a handout. Similarly, a national UBI would encourage immigration at first, but would also give every citizen a monetary incentive to close the gates while clearly demarcating in-group versus out-group. This direct skin in the game could counter the elite bribery that mostly prevents effective border controls at present.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, UBI could fuel a surge of anti-establishment activism. Many people who work in menial, low-paying jobs with little hope of advancement would prefer to be professional political activists, and UBI would allow them to do this. Those with careers who fear losing them if they speak out of turn would also have a fallback strategy, if a less luxurious one. This surge would primarily be libertarian and rightist, as leftists have an entrenched establishment to protect their activists from the harms that other activists suffer. UBI would not solve the problems of deplatforming or anarcho-tyranny, but it may make them so onerous that they can no longer go unsolved, which is the general objective of a bootlegger political strategy.

In summary, UBI has effects across the board that are useful and even vital for libertarians and rightists who wish for a freer hand in the political arena and greater realization of their overall visions for society. It is therefore easy to agree with statists for the wrong reasons when they propose a universal basic income.

References:

1. “What Is It? – Citizen’s Income”.
2. More, Thomas (1516). Utopia, Book 2: Discourse on Utopia.
3. Nicolas de Condorcet (1794). Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit.
4. Spicker, Paul (2011, Jan. 19). How Social Security Works. Bristol University Press.
5. “Citizen’s Income – An unconditional, nonwithdrawable income paid to every individual as a right of citizenship”.
6. Blaschke, Ronald (2012). The basic income debate in Germany and some basic reflections.
7. Krahe, Dialika (2009, Aug. 10). “How a Basic Income Program Saved a Namibian Village”. Spiegel Online.
8. Mathews, Dylan (2017, Mar. 6). “This Kenyan village is a laboratory for the biggest basic income experiment ever”. Vox.com.
9. Monsebraaten, Laurie (2017, Apr. 24). “Ontario launches basic income pilot for 4,000 in Hamilton, Thunder Bay, Lindsay”. Toronto Star. Star Media Group.
10. Evans, David K.; Popova, Anna (2014, May 1). “Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods: A Review of Global Evidence. Policy Research Working Paper 6886”. The World Bank. Office of the Chief Economist.: 1–3.
11. “What is Universal Basic Income?”.Andrew Yang 2020 Presidential Campaign.
12. Mulvaney, Mick (2017, Mar. 16). “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again”. Office of Management and Budget.
13. Standing, Guy (2017). Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. Pelican Books. Ch. 7.
14. Konczal, Mike (2013, May 11). “Thinking Utopian: How about a universal basic income?”. Washington Post.
15. Boffey, Daniel (2015, Dec. 26). “Dutch city plans to pay citizens a ‘basic income’, and Greens say it could work in the UK”. The Guardian.
16. Séguin, Gilles (1994). “Improving Social Security in Canada – Guaranteed Annual Income: A Supplementary Paper”. Government of Canada.
17. Katada, Kaori. “Basic Income and Feminism: in terms of ‘the gender division of labor’”.
18. McLean, Caitlin (Sept. 2015). “Beyond Care: Expanding the Feminist Debate on Universal Basic Income”. WiSE.
19. Lambert, Hugh (2017, Mar. 23). “Mannerbund And The Sexual Dynamics Of Coordination”. Social Matter.

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