我改变了对全民基本收入的看法

I got this e-mail yesterday about UBI, and it made me change my position.

I think you’re misunderstanding the basic premise of UBI, as it’s in the name it’s basic income, for people to cover their basic human rights, as we should be striving for in our society. If every person on the planet would start receiving 300$ per month of course the prices would surely adjust, but as it’s the case, supply and demand would put the priorities in the right place (if the eggs are being sold for 500$ a crate, I can assure you people will grow chickens).

Ignoring the nonsense about “basic human rights” (unlike maybe something like free speech, you have no human right to food, because that would imply you have the right to steal from people who grow food). Let’s follow the rest of this argument out.

We are in agreement that after UBI, the price of eggs would go up. And in response, people will start growing their own chickens. Now the work they wanted the free money to avoid doing they will be doing anyway, but that’s not even the best part of this.

So great, people are growing chickens. Some people will be better at growing chickens than others. They’ll be so good at it in fact that they’ll have a surplus of eggs. Maybe the right thing to do is sell the eggs.

However, if they sell the eggs for the UBI dollars, they don’t have much purchasing power with the dollars they earn. It’s not just eggs, everything is expensive in UBI land! So maybe he makes a deal with the guy down the road for chicken feed directly, you give me feed, I’ll grow the chickens, and I’ll give you eggs.

He also needs chicken coop wire, and there’s a guy a town over who makes that. But it’s a bit annoying to trade eggs, he doesn’t want to have to deliver them. So they agree that instead of eggs, they should just use gold. Something durable, portable, fungible, and scarce. The chicken feed guy gets in on this gold system too. Before long, there’s an underground gold economy for everything.

Because there isn’t this massive drain on the new economy subsidizing all these people who aren’t working, the gold economy is way more efficient than the UBI dollar economy. It outcompetes it, and suddenly there’s practically nothing you can buy with UBI dollars (except maybe you can pay your taxes in UBI dollars, this is sounding better and better). In hushed whispers among the productive, “err, I don’t really want dollars, you got gold?”

At the beginning of the Trump administration, I said we’ll know if anything is different if the government budget is cut by over 50%. That was far too optimistic. Despite all the noise made about DOGE and cutting, the budget from 2024 to 2025 went up 3.1%. What’s an extra $210B among friends?

It’s clear the government is never going to shrink itself. I mostly liked Trump’s state of the union, but then there was the part where he promised to never touch Social Security and Medicare. There’s a real irony in the way the Federal Government breaks down the budget. There’s Discretionary (27%), which is everything a government should do, and there’s Mandatory (60%) which is entitlement programs that give money to old people. Look look, it’s right there in the name, “Mandatory” that means we can never cut it. Three fifths of the budget is Mandatory. We shouldn’t even talk about cutting that, we can’t, it’s Mandatory.

In Soviet Russia, you didn’t criticise Stalin by saying you wanted less Stalin. That’s bad and gets you disappeared. But perhaps you could say something like, man Stalin is soooo great I wish we had 50 Stalins, nay, 500 Stalins! A Stalin for every man women and child.

So yea, I support UBI now. Free money for you! Free money for your neighbors! Free money for corporations! Free money for illegal immigrants! Free money for the whole damn planet! Where does this free money come from? Print it! Mint the coin! FREE MONEY!!!! UNIVERSAL!!!!!!

This is the only way to get rid of Social Security. Sorry sorry, did I say cut entitlement programs? Obviously that can’t happen, they are “Mandatory.” Keep the entitlement programs, just have them pay out fake worthless money. The only way out is through.