What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money? Apr 25, 2016 at 6:00 AM By Andrew Flowers
(Notable conservatives/libertarians have also considered "basic income" including Milton Friedman, Charles Murray, etc, as a means to reduce the size/cost of government and increase personal freedom)
Daniel Straub remembers the night he got hooked on basic income. He had invited Götz Werner, a billionaire owner of a German drugstore chain, to give an independent talk in Zurich, where Straub was working as a project manager for a think tank. He had read an article about the radical proposal to unconditionally guarantee citizens an income and spent a few years casually researching the idea. Straub had heard Werner was a good speaker on the topic, and that night in 2009 he was indeed excellent at connecting with the audience, a sold-out house of 200. “It was a very intense evening; people were paying attention,” Straub recalled.
Werner posed a pair of simple questions to the crowd: What do you really want to do with your life? Are you doing what you really want to do? Whatever the answers, he suggested basic income was the means to achieve those goals. The idea is as simple as it is radical: Rather than concern itself with managing myriad social welfare and unemployment insurance programs, the government would instead regularly cut a no-strings-attached check to each citizen. No conditions. No questions. Everyone, rich or poor, employed or out of work would get the same amount of money. This arrangement would provide a path toward a new way of living: If people no longer had to worry about making ends meet, they could pursue the lives they want to live.
Straub had studied business, international policy and psychology at school and spent years working for IBM, the International Red Cross and a Montessori school. Basic income “struck a nerve,” he said. “People are burned out more than ever. You come to Switzerland and talk to people, they aren’t happy. They fear for their jobs. There is a gap between the economic possibility in this country and the quality of life.”
After Werner’s talk, Straub quit his job at the think tank and began to campaign for a basic income full time. He and a few hundred volunteers gathered 126,000 signatures over two years to force a referendum, now slated for June 5, to amend the Swiss Constitution to guarantee a basic income to all citizens. (The suggested amount is 2,500 Swiss francs per month, or about $1,700 after adjusting for the cost of living.)
Switzerland is one of the world’s richest countries, and compared to the United States, it offers far more generous health care and education to its citizens. But supporters of the referendum think the government can provide even more security. “We limit ourselves too much,” Straub said. “I’m interested in consciousness, expanding consciousness. And basic income is a wonderful tool for that — it challenges a lot of assumptions we have.”
The entirety of the Swiss government opposes the referendum, citing potential effects on people’s willingness to work and the huge fiscal costs as reasons to vote “no.” Even Straub and his fellow supporters don’t expect it to pass. But he’s excited by the enthusiasm, and media attention, he’s seen for the idea in the past few years. Just getting on the ballot “was a moment of hope, for me and for a lot of other people,” he said. “It was a moment of departure.”
He’s right that interest in basic income is spreading across the world. Finland and the Netherlands are developing plans to study the idea. Canada will likely see an experiment in Ontario, if not on a national level. In France, several members of Parliament have supported running an experiment, and the finance minister is open to it. And in January, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, announced that the San Francisco-based startup fund was organizing a basic income study in the U.S.
“In the last five years we’ve taken on a new respectability. But in the last two years it has become an avalanche,” said Guy Standing, a British economist who co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986 to promote debate and research on the topic. Initially a small cabal of young economists, philosophers and activists, BIEN has grown into the largest hub for basic income supporters — a global network with national organizations in 23 countries.
Basic income, Standing says, is more than good policy. He calls it “essential,” given that more and more people in developed economies are living “a life of chronic economic insecurity.” He sees this insecurity fueling populist politicians, boosting far-right parties across Europe and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. Economic stagnation increases the appeal of extreme politicians, and unless those insecurities are addressed, Standing said, that appeal is only going to get stronger.
The economic uncertainty surrounding basic income is huge, and the politics of bringing such a program about on a large scale are daunting. But something makes this radical proposal so exciting that people and governments are increasingly willing to try it. Basic income challenges our notions of the social safety net, the relationship between work and income, and how to adapt to technological change. That makes it one of the most audacious social policy experiments in modern history. It could fail disastrously, or it could change everything for the better.
Basic income has attracted a motley crew of supporters, spanning the ideological spectrum. Efficiency-minded libertarians like the idea of streamlining the bureaucracy of the welfare state. Silicon Valley techies hope a guaranteed income would cushion the blow as automation replaces human jobs. Those with a more utopian bent, such as the organizers of the Swiss referendum, want to open up more options, to let people create art and free the world of what Straub calls “bullshit jobs.”
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/
