It was once nothing more than wild speculation within the lofty ivory towers of Harvard and Yale, and maybe in the corporate boardrooms of America’s most “forward-looking companies.”
Humans are almost obsolete. Jeff Bezos, even if he is nothing more than a brain floating in an anomalous liquid mounted onto a robot, is likely to find a way to replace every human being’s job within the century. That being the case, wonder the titans of industry, finance and scholarship, how do we keep the proles from rebelling against their own planned obsolescence? The answer that many have arrived at is: Universal Basic Income (UBI), otherwise known as free money.
When UBI first became a topic of media and public attention, it was widely derided as a pie-in-the-sky solution to America’s growing economic inequality; however, as new technologies threaten to cost millions of Americans their livelihoods, younger politicians began to look upon the idea with favor. Most famously, Andrew Yang, entrepreneur, 2020 Democratic primary challenger, and current candidate for mayor of the Big Apple, campaigned on the promise of implementing a $1,000 a month direct deposit to Americans below a certain income threshold. Yang’s UBI plan, while being widely mocked in establishment political and media circles, was embraced by young people on both sides of the political spectrum. So called “Yangbucks” could appeal to young men and women of all political persuasions that, following the 2008 Recession, found themselves in a contracting economy with few job prospects and mountains of college debt.
It seemed as if real talk of UBI died after Yang’s poor showing in the Democratic primaries, but then something amazing happened… COVID happened.
Well, not amazing. Actually really terrible, but nevertheless people got comfortable with the idea of the government dumping mountains of cash on private citizens really quick, to the point where junior Republican lawmakers were stumping with Bernie Sanders for more “stimulus money” by the end of 2020.
“The checks,” as they are now called, have a broad cross-party appeal. For liberals, they are seen as a natural extension of the government’s duty to protect the commonweal and insulate those who have lost their jobs or had their hours reduced because of COVID from financial ruin: evictions, repossessions, foreclosure and being unable to buy food or pay utilities. For conservatives, stimulus payments do that while also buoying a drowning economy. More cynical constituents might even see the direct payments as an indirect raid on the Treasury: the government spends millions for “gender programs” in Pakistan, they should be able to cut American citizens, whom they purport to represent, a slice of that pork.
As a new stimulus bill passes congressional muster, pushing out another $1,400 to millions of low-income Americans, some have begun to ask the question: why not just do this indefinitely? Several cities across the world are already toying with the idea, not the least New York City if Yang becomes mayor.
It’s not all said and done, though. For some, the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t made the case for UBI. Just the opposite, in fact.
Michael Rozworski, writing in the socialist magazine Jacobin, argues that COVID-era stimulus payments stand in the way of a truly just economic order and stand only to reinforce the economic status quo. He writes:
If I can’t pay the grocer, then they can’t pay the wholesaler, who in turn can’t pay the producer. All of them can’t pay their landlords, who, if they have mortgages, then can’t pay the banks. And so on in an endless spiral that ends with mass bankruptcies and unemployment. Income supports let people survive by greasing the wheels of commerce that would otherwise grind to a disastrous halt. They are not about altering the distribution of resources in any more fundamental way.
Obviously (since I’m not a socialist) I could care less that stimulus payments aren’t ushering in the worker’s revolution, but it’s not just socialists that are sour on UBI. Harvard Political Review dislikes UBI for a more boring reason: it’s too expensive.
One thing is certain: COVID-19, the government’s stimulus efforts, and talk of UBI has reinvigorated a discussion about the future of employment in a time where more and more economic decisions are being made at scale by national governments, who are sending out unprecedented no-strings-attached cash benefits to their citizens.
If, in the future, changes in the economic calculus like widespread adoption of automation make the current system untenable, a working model for UBI has already been tested in most advanced economies. But, just as left-of-center figures have warned that UBI is just a bandage on late-stage capitalism, so too I think if free money from Uncle Sam became a reality, it wouldn’t be because the government suddenly decided to care about the little guy, but rather because economic elites need it to maintain status quo ante. In other words, it’s just a question of what route your money takes on its way to make someone else rich.
Image Credit / MemeGenerator.com
