While we’re all reeling from the insanity of AOC’s Green New Deal, liberals around the world are busy being idiots. Our own domestic breed might be the most extreme, but bad ideas are not relegated to our country alone.
One of the tenets of AOC’s Green New Deal and a staple of socialism is for governments to expand social services. Among those services, the most extreme and controversial is Universal Basic Income (UBI). Basically, it’s a system where the government gives people a check every month. That check isn’t for any specific purpose. They’re just paying people to exist.
You can already guess why this is a bad idea, but leftist governments around the world (and a couple of California cities) have tried out this concept. Today, we’re going to look hard at the results of these programs.
The Theory of Universal Basic Income
Socialism supporters like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been pushing this concept for a while. It’s nothing more than a wealth redistribution scheme and a method of literal socialism. That said, we’ll cover the ideology.
The theory is that if everyone gets a check from the government every month then there is less stress on finances. That reduced stress helps people to find more motivation, work harder and be more productive.
In cases where liberals are trying to make UBI a thing, they argue that it will increase job growth. You can’t make this stuff up. The left is seriously trying to tell us that wealth redistribution will make people work harder. Any rational person knows better, but now we have hard evidence that shows, once again, that the liberals are wrong.
Thanks, Finland
Of course this was tried in Scandinavia. Last year, Finland committed to a legitimately experimental take on UBI. They created two test groups of unemployed Fins. Each was 2,000 persons large. One group was given a monthly UBI of a little more than $600 a month. The other was given nothing. The group running the experiment then compared the two groups to see what impacts, if any, came from the UBI checks.
The original hope of the experiment is that it would confirm the liberal theory. Namely, they were hoping the group receiving the checks would have a better time finding jobs. In the greatest shock and twist of this century, the Fins found that UBI did not increase employment.
It also had no discernable impact on the economic situation of the test group. Somehow, despite receiving extra money every month, unemployed Finns were not magically motivated to get a job. The UBI also didn’t magically create jobs to ease the unemployment rate. Crazy.
Still, the Finnish government is trying to claim that the experiment was a success. They’ve stopped the UBI program, but they feel it was a good thing because the people receiving the monthly income claimed to be happier than those who didn’t get a check.
In fact, they went as far as to say that redefining the goals of UBI is the key to success. Rather than use it to help job growth, it should be a program aimed at making the population happier. That could never backfire.
Thousands of Years of History
The very concept of UBI is counter to human nature. We’ve known common wisdom — like necessity is the mother of invention — for a long time. All of that conventional wisdom tells us that when people get something for free, their expectations change. Some people might be grateful, but eventually everyone comes to rely on the handouts. This isn’t unique to humans, by the way. There’s a reason parks tell you not to feed the bears.
In reality, every wealth redistribution scheme ends the same way. The people in charge of collecting and distributing the wealth recognize their power and start to keep more for themselves. It always leads to an oligarchy where the lower class is outright starving to death (we’re looking at you Venezuela).
Thanks to Finland, we can add experimental evidence to conventional wisdom. UBI is clearly a bad idea and a waste of money. The notion that it could create employment was always stupid, and the Finnish government now agrees with that assessment.
Anyone who continues to push this nonsense isn’t interested in helping people. They’re interested in trying to purchase votes from people who stand to get a handout check every month.
