Penna Dexter

A really bad idea is bubbling up from the left. It stems partly from the idea that Artificial Intelligence and the resulting automation of jobs, from driving to technology, will displace so many workers, we’ve just gotta do something.

The Universal Basic Income has been floated by Barack Obama and certain Silicon Valley titans, among them Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Mark Zuckerberg. They see UBI as an efficient way to prevent poverty in our hyper-automated and globalized future.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is helping to fund a pilot UBI project in Stockton, California that launches next month. Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar asks, “if jobs simply go away, what are we going to do with the workforce?” He’s introduced legislation that would establish a pilot program that would give $500 per month to 1000 families.

Most basic income proposals are local, but there’s talk of taking this national. Investment management firm Bridgewater Associates estimates the cost at $3.8 trillion per year to give people a basic income of $12,000. The entire federal budget is just over $4 trillion.

Finland launched a basic income program in 2017. Two thousand unemployed people received a monthly stipend — no strings attached. The government pulled the plug. According to the Daily Signal’s Jarett Stepman, “taxpayers simply became fed up with paying people not to work.” To implement the program nationally would have necessitated a 30 percent tax increase.

Jarett Stepman writes that, with UBI, we’d risk creating a kind of “warehoused society whereby one class of people works while the other skates by mostly on public money, seeing no incentive to work or better their condition and status.”

UBI is the Left’s dream. The Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler calls it “a gateway drug to collectivism.”JFK worried about machines stealing jobs in the 60’s, telling reporters, “automation, of course, is replacing men.”

That fear ignores the genius of our capitalist system.