If there is anything positive to be said about the growing chorus of voices advocating a “Universal Basic Income” or UBI, it’s that the long-term critics of the welfare state have at last been proven correct. The flowery language of “safety nets” and “a hand up, not a handout” has always been a lie, and the proof is indisputable in this latest notion.
Tag: wealth
The Division of Labor is Valuable Even in a Perfectly Equal World
If I can imagine a single scenario in which two people with zero difference in skill or preference can both benefit from the division of labor and exchange, my answer was correct and the professor was wrong. (This was like 10 years ago. Still, can’t let it go.)
Blaming Progress for So-Called Inequality
It’s bad enough when liberals are Luddites, but it’s far worse when they’re anti-tech because not everyone can have it. If they had their way, never mind cell phones or flat-screen TVs: they’d have torn down the first hut that anyone built, demanding that it be available to all instead of just the few.
Aggression Justifies More Aggression?
“Well of course, as a libertarian I would ideally want the market to handle everything, but as long as government taxes, regulations and licensing make health care so expensive, we can’t give up Medicare and Medicaid!”
Immigration and Social Engineering
Social engineers of all parties and persuasions talk as though an economy is some kind of mechanism to be centrally fine-tuned and overhauled occasionally according to a plan. Even those who style themselves free enterprisers display the central-planning mentality when it comes to immigration.
What the Left Should Like about Public Choice
Although the public choice school of political economy has been demonized in a new work of putatively progressive fiction masquerading as intellectual history, good-faith leftists (if they don’t already regard themselves as libertarians) may be surprised by how their cause could benefit from the insights of James Buchanan, et al.
We Are the Economy They Want to Regulate
The question is not whether the market should be regulated, but who should regulate it. And the only two choices are: 1) market participants through the exercise of their free and peaceful choices or 2) politicians and bureaucrats relying on the threat of violence to impose their will.
Develop an Abundant Understanding of Abundance
It’s important to value yourself, but it’s equally important to not be too defensive or short-sighted when it comes to opportunities that aren’t accompanied by a nice paycheck.
Spiting Putin, Banning Nukes
Deterrence only works because states are so involved in the political affairs of other states, rather than letting their markets do the talking and create “mutually assured wealth explosion” in the pursuit of nuclear disarmament.
Late Night Horror Movie of Your Own Making
Dilbert’s Scott Adams says everyone sees the world as a sort of “movie” playing on a screen in their mind. Different people see the same events differently, depending on the specific “movie” they are watching.