Basic income not just crazy socialism
Swiss voters Sunday rejected a proposal to write every citizen a check for just enough money to cover food and housing, whether they worked or not.
Most Texans who heard about the referendum likely rolled their eyes at what they considered another crazy idea from Socialist-minded Europeans.
Yet the argument for a universal basic income also showed up as a major essay in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday from Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist and critic of welfare programs.
The argument goes like this: Rather than spend billions of dollars administering thousands of programs to provide housing, health care and unemployment insurance to a narrow slice of the population, the government should simply write everyone a check for the same amount.
Murray argues that would get government out of people’s lives by eliminating intrusive eligibility verification. Everyone would get a check, not just the few who know how to work the system.
The biggest reason for adopting a universal basic income, though, is that technology is replacing humans in the workplace.
I’ve written about the end of jobs and the rise of the freelance economy, and how computers are beginning to replace whitecollar workers. But I’m not convinced we’re at the end of invention, which remains a uniquely human skill for the foreseeable future. We need people inventing new things.
There may come a day when computers and robots do most of the work and our government provides all of us with basic needs so that we can pursue our dreams, however noble or puerile. But we’re not there yet. The Swiss made the right decision, but I suspect we’ll revisit the question in the future.