Tag: Universal Basic Income

Never Let a Good Crisis go to Waste

March 17, 2020

Yes, the Coronavirus is a real threat, and is now a global crisis. Economies are crashing, businesses are shuttered, people are unemployed. Toilet paper is impossible to find, as is Lysol, Clorox, and other disinfectants. But, naturally, politicians never let a good crisis go to waste. In today’s press conference, President Trump hinted at implementing … Read more

Finland Discovers What You Already Knew – Universal Basic Income Doesn’t Work

February 10, 2019 Steve MacDonald

From January 2017 through December 2018 the Finnish government gave 2000 people a universal basic income. Money for nothing. The theory, as dumb as it sounds, is that if the government provides unemployed people money, they will go find work. When it launched the pilot scheme back in 2017, Finland became the first European country to test out … Read more

Dem Prez Candidate Andrew Yang wants the Feds to be more like China in watching EVERYTHING we do.

November 22, 2018 Skip

Andrew Yang wants to be the Democrat nominee for President and it is really clear that he’s all in on the idea of “who needs God when you’ve got Government” (aka, bastardizing the Christian Doxology of “Praise God from whom all blessings flow”). This guy from New York is already in on UBI (Universal Basic Income, along with a European style Value Added Tax of 10% to pay for it) where the Government just prints us all a check for about a grand a month because robots are going to be taking our jobs. Yep, crawl onto the dole on the magnificent sum of $12K a year – such a bountiful life that amount would yield (anyone for Serf City?).

But there’s a much more insidious plank he’s running on, this candidate from the People’s Republic of NY and it should give anyone a real pause as to what he believes is The Proper Role of Government. No, it’s not straight outta Compton, but it is directly out of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance machine / real time “reeducation camp” idea of good governance. I think this line from the American Thinker sets the stage well:

Leftists always insist that their proposals for socialism will be nothing like what’s found in communist hellholes way down the rapids to the falls. But somehow, the opening ideas are always the same.

Like I pointed out here –

Ubitopia

September 26, 2018July 23, 2018 Ian Underwood

Suddenly, it’s everywhere. Lately I’ve even heard even libertarians suggesting that it might be a good idea to provide a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to replace the buffet of specific welfare programs that are now available to people who can’t afford things like housing (Section 8), heat (LIHEAP), medical care (Medicaid), food (SNAP), and so on.

This idea is a classic example of what Thomas Sowell calls ‘stage one thinking’, which is the apparent inability (or unwillingness) to appreciate that actions have consequences, and consequences propagate.

(Yes, I know that Milton Friedman advocated for a negative income tax, which is one type of universal basic income. But Friedman also advocated for income tax withholding, which has turned into what we might call ‘the opiate of the taxes’.)