The “smart” people in Silicon Valley are repackaging an old idea in order to sugar-coat their brave new world order of artificial intelligence. The elites anticipate that, since most jobs will be obsolete with AI, there will be a scarcity of jobs, so they will need to keep the unemployed content. Like previous emperors, their solution is bread and circuses.

These tech leaders want to insulate themselves against any potential unrest with their planned AI economic disruption. They truly believe that distributing money without strings is an effective and unbureaucratic way to help struggling people. The idea is called “Universal Basic Income”, but the reality of UBI is “You Be Indolent”.

The tech titans are very confident that the AI-generated world will be massively abundant and produce gobs of cash that they (in their majestic goodness) will then be able to distribute to the basket of deplorables.

Universal Basic Income is welfare. Free money does not buy happiness. A livelihood is a purpose-driven life and life without purpose is not worth living. Why would anyone go to school if there is no need to work? The titans of tech believe that AI will deliver riches which can then be spread equally to the masses to provide “a level of prosperity and hopefully happiness that we can’t quite imagine yet,” said Elon Musk.

Actually, we can imagine what would happen if employment were to end and income were redistributed. We can imagine that scenario because it happened during the government-mandated COVID shutdown and the redistribution of taxpayer money.

When the government shut down the American economy in March 2020, Congress voted to send cash payments to many Americans (under a certain income threshold) and the U.S. government paid millions of people not to work. Congress authorized $600 per week in unemployment bonuses early in the pandemic. The consequences were substantial, including prolonging unemployment and economic underperformance.

The human results were severe economic and social costs, because unemployment has lifetime consequences for individuals, families, and communities. There are many non-monetary benefits to work and there are social costs to unemployment. Livelihoods are lives. 

Some of the extra personal and societal costs of being paid to sit on the sofa include increased drug and alcohol use, breakup of marriages, disruption of career paths and lower lifetime earnings, poorer academics for children, and increased crime. Five years later, children are still suffering from the disruption in education. All of us pay the price when some are paid not to work.

Today, city mayors are gloating that crime in their cities has dropped – but that is only because it has dropped from the high crime spike in 2020-21. The devil does make mischief for idle hands.

Economics is all about incentives and, in 2020, people had a large incentive not to work. If non-work pays better than work, then no one will work. It does not matter if the extra money is spent on necessities, the heart of the problem is that money with no strings attached is a disincentive to work.

Payments for not working end up hurting the very people they are designed to benefit. According to the Urban Institute: “The long-term unemployed tend to earn less once they find new jobs. They tend to be in poorer health and have children with worse academic performance than similar workers who avoided unemployment. Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.”

The best way to help struggling people is to give them a purpose, not a purse. A job provides a purpose, discipline, satisfaction, community, and responsibility — none of which ever come from a free handout. Politicians like to hand out money in order to get votes. Perhaps the tech industry leaders prefer to have more customers devoting their day to social media apps instead of concentrating on a real job to accomplish.

The Universal Basic Income is socialism. These tech leaders really believe that they can do a better job than government and that their largess will solve all of societal ills. When people are dependent on others for income, they are not free people. When people are beholden to whomever holds the purse strings, then they lose all individual rights.