Social Matter

Universal basic income arguments have become increasingly popular, thanks to high-profile advocates like Charles Murray, who is in turn adapting a proposal by Milton Friedman for a ‘negative income tax.’ [1]

I haven’t had the time to read Murray’s In Our Hands, so I can’t address what he says in that directly. In any case, the majority of people that you’re likely to run into who argue for basic income tend to shave off the serial numbers of their arguments, instead just pretending like the idea came to them through the ether. Because many of the advocates for it are left-wing, and because both Charles Murray and Milton Friedman are considered evil by the left, it makes sense that most of them would do their best to conceal its background.

You will often find generic advocates for Universal Basic Income in the technology community, based on the highly speculative thesis that intelligent machines will render all human labor obsolete shortly.

There’s also a socialist heritage to the argument that’s significantly older, but the context in which it’s advanced tends to be quite different. In addition, practically, there are so many mandatory conditions to being a socialist citizen that the proposal is not quite the same when argued by a socialist as it is when argued by a capitalist.

There are a number of problems with the proposal, which tends to be offering a check to all citizens who meet some basic conditions (such as being out of jail and above a certain age). Most of the issues tend to be waived away by idealists who tend to present it as an urgent proposal that must be implemented as quickly as possible.

The chief problem with the way that it’s argued for is that it tends to be presented by ordinary people shorn of the intended context. Friedman and later Murray proposed the negative income tax in the context of deregulating professions, eliminating most other welfare programs, and shifting most of the effective taxation within the government to central bank policy.

Deleting all the context of the proposal renders it much less meaningful. If you shear away the intended goals of the policy, substituting them for an airy “public welfare” or “because it’s important before the hypothetical robots replace us all,” you take away the only methods by which you could evaluate its effectiveness when implemented. Anchoring the proposal to Kurzweil-style singularity predictions is similarly misguided, because his predictions are speculative.

If it turns out to be correct, what we should do with the welfare system becomes irrelevant compared to other, more pressing issues — like a real evolutionary competitor to humanity. If that’s the problem, then the solution is not to insulate more humans from competition. That would just exacerbate the problem of becoming the No. 2 species on the planet. Giving everyone a welfare check does nothing to address that issue. Given a problem with the solution of ‘enhance the species to be competitive,’ paying everyone to play video games would not cut it.

Further, the negative income tax proposal is reverse-progressive, in that lower income people receive greater subsidies, whereas the poorer receive less. Universal basic income proposals tend to advocate for a flat stipend to everyone regardless of income.

When it has been attempted, there have been enormous difficulties negotiating the transition from more conventional welfare systems. In practice, despite high-profile advocates at the presidential level in the US, it has been impossible to dismantle welfare bureaucracies, at least with the constitutional political structure. [2] It has been difficult to implement these programs even as test flights within individual states and provinces, if only because the people being tested know that it’s a test that will be cancelled later.

The reason for this might be that proposals that are motivated by a desire to liquidate the jobs of the bureaucratic class are necessarily opposed by that selfsame class who don’t like the sound of that idea and have substantial powers that they can use to defend against their destruction.

On the right, especially the outer right, it makes no sense to advocate for basic income policies while also claiming to be against egalitarianism. The entire point of the policy is to provide the lowly with an income that they can’t themselves earn merely for possessing citizenship papers. Citizenship papers already entitle people to welfare with bureaucratic overhead, but it at least makes a pretense towards means-testing in an attempt to shape society in a more productive direction.

The right-wing position ought to be that we expect most people on the planet to be marginal in the market economy, because that’s what we observe. The notion that everyone in the third world is one loan or educational program or Millennium Village away from becoming a successful entrepreneur is deeply muddled. Ability creates its own access to credit: credit does not transfer ability into a person through some magic procedure.

Believing that markets are highly effective ways to allocate resources does not mean that you must also believe that everyone is capable of full participation in the market economy. Grappling with this has been a core problem for the West when our culture both developed industrial technology and abolished the systems of slavery, indenture, and serfdom.

The same babble about computers occurred around tractors and assembly lines. It’s a similar dynamic. The answer is not to tell everyone to learn how to code in the same way that not all peasants are capable to become machinists or desire to become machinists.

In the 19th century, the abolitionists won the day, if not by force of argument then by force of arms. Their assumptions about human nature have become our assumptions. The idea that everyone is fit for wage-labor has not been born out  by experience, despite numerous schemes intended to induce ‘full employment,’ none have ever succeeded, and perhaps there are good reasons for why it has not succeeded, some good reasons as to why some people might not be as good at responding to incentives as others.

The previously implemented set of legal institutions allowed for the basic provision of the incompetent while ensuring that their efforts were directed towards productivity rather than destruction. These legal norms have been implemented all over the world by all types of civilizations of varying levels of sophistication and technology. It involves restricting the legal rights of certain classes of people, with those people gaining some measure of security for which they give up some measure of liberty.

Reverting to what worked is unsayable. So, instead, people invent Rube Goldberg cloud-policies to address a problem that our ancestors resolved while remaining in the politically correct boundaries. If we take human inequality as a given, rather than something to be glossed over in the name of egalitarian idealism, then the best course of action reveals itself.

[1]http://books.cat-v.org/economics/capitalism-and-freedom/chapter_12

[2]http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html