Should We Universally Adopt Universal Basic Income?
When we discuss the future of work, how individuals should be compensated and what businesses should do to enforce fair pay, an old idea has resurrected — universal basic income (UBI).
Universal basic income is a model for providing all citizens a specific sum of money as a means to increase equality and eliminate poverty.
The idea isn’t new. Economist and philosopher Friederich Hayek endorsed it in the third volume of his trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty. In 1962, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman advocated a minimum guaranteed income via a “negative income tax.”
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said,
“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Richard Nixon unsuccessfully tried to pass a version of Friedman’s plan a few years later, and his Democratic opponent in the 1972 presidential election, George McGovern, also suggested a guaranteed annual income.
In the United States, the idea is not only being discussed but tested. Some of the pilot programs are implementing a basic income of $1,000/month while other proposals set the amount higher but carve out a certain portion for…
