I tend to be in agreement with Paul Winfree’s conclusions in his post about a universal basic income program at The Daily Signal. The reasoning has been well-known for hundreds for years and was summarized well by Voltaire: “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” I would add several things.
First, even if need were eliminated boredom and vice would remain and there are no ready replacements for work in alleviating those. Second, work also provides something else: a sense of identity and purpose and those are as necessary as food, water, or air. A world without work will be a desperate one.
Finally, there is no practical way to eliminate the fraud which will overwhelm any system.
Here’s Mr. Winfree’s peroration:
The policy challenge is not to find a more equitable way to distribute national income, but rather to support opportunity and a strong civil society through work.
There are any number of ways that could be accomplished. Mr. Winfree’s proposal (reducing disincentives to work) assumes that jobs that pay an adequate wage are available, something for which he provides no evidence.
There are other strategies. For example, we could subsidize wages. We could recognize that half or more of the population will never become doctors, lawyers, or accountants, find such work unsatisfying, and need to work with their hands. The reason that working with your hands no longer pays a living wage is a combination of the distaste for such jobs on the part of elites, an uneven playing field with China and other countries with large, unskilled populations, and our immigration policy.
Or we could implement a guaranteed jobs program, as has been suggested by a regular commenter here.
With a guarantee I do think it would be necessary to make significant changes in immigration policy, most notably an immediate freeze to deal with demand we can expect to skyrocket. As other countries adopt guarantees with equivalent wages we can drop controls for those nations so long as they agree to reciprocate.
Paul Winfree’s article was an enjoyable, straight forward read. One of the highlights was how work effects people other than through their fiscal needs:
One can see these cultural shifts in today’s millennials — the increases of free-floating anxiety and depression in this group, along with delaying commitments in relationships, adult obligations etc.
Then there was the following concluding statements which flies in the face of the Bernie Sander’s political platform and utopian vision of the future:
This could be achieved by reducing the disincentive to work through reforms of the tax and welfare systems
Am I to understand that I’m being disincentized to work because I’m not being taxed enough? I thought I was being disincentivized to work because there weren’t enough jobs, and because both parties would rather the jobs go to Mexicans and Indians instead of Americans.
I’m not sure Winfree is distinguishing between leisure and idleness. There’s a difference in using free time for rest, family, creative pursuits and using free time for nothing at all but growing resentment.
In their leisure time I find people studying meteorology, astronomy, complex statistics in sports, doing gardening, literature, carpentry; the things they like rather than the things they must.
In my dream I see a society where work is a gateway to flourishing rather than an impediment locking us into stagnancy and consuming our best years.
What is a guaranteed jobs program?
It’s a countercyclical stabilization program in which a person unable to find paid work in the private sector can do so for the public sector or non-profits in their own community (if they wish.) It would be funded by the federal government with local communities deciding allocation of resources rather than a central board.
That was a very valid differentiation, Ben, regarding the difference between leisure and idleness.
I would think the devil would be very much in the details of a plan like that, Ben. Is there anyone that has seriously proposed it?
The odds are pretty good that you’ve driven past the results of such a program. The WPA and CCC were both forms of guaranteed jobs programs albeit much more centrally managed than what Ben has outlined.
Right, but is there any doubt that such programs today would have been infiltrated by graft and corruption? I suppose that the idea of local allocation is meant to circumvent that but I’m skeptical that it could work. Wasn’t there an attempt to do something similar with ARRA, where local governments were supposed to submit their lists of needs? Not exactly a jobs program, but my analogy is to the federal funding/local control model.
Other potential problems that come to mind include the interface with welfare (Ben states this would be voluntary- so how does the choice to forego the job affect eligibility for entitlements?) and how this could possibly be just a counter cyclical program (do the needs fulfilled by the jobs really dry up when the business cycle picks up?)
Jobs programs are harder to pervert than block grant programs are.
Maybe…and I would like to think this could work but I wouldn’t underestimate the talents of our political and business class for finding a way.
This might answer some questions.
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.cfeps.org/pubs/wp-pdf/WP39-MitchellWray.pdf&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwjuqIqIs5_LAhUFRyYKHdNdC90QFggZMAU&usg=AFQjCNHiEB6Km8egHQLFavZWCZy-kuNQXA
Thanks for the link, Ben.