UBI: Unbelievably Bad Idea

Rather than proposing universal basic income as the solution to robots supposedly taking all our jobs, the task should be to improve federal worker adjustment assistance programs.

Hey kids, want to be in on the latest cool fad? Well here you go: UBI.

Yeah—UBI: universal basic income. No more worries. No more cares. No more teachers’ dirty looks. Just biweekly government checks for the rest of your life. Sign me up, Scotty.

Sometimes it’s hard not to just break out laughing at some of the harebrained ideas that so-called experts and pundits offer. UBI has to rank near the top.

UBI has been widely proposed as the solution to AI-powered robots supposedly doing all the jobs. And it’s not just the granola-eating commie hippies promoting it.

Stanford (as you would expect) has jumped on the bandwagon with its “Basic Income Lab.” The lab was founded by former Stanford professor Juliana Bidadanure, whose research focuses on “our commitment to equality” while she “diagnoses unjust inequalities.” Perhaps not surprising for someone who publishes in prestigious journals such as Studies in Marxism.

It would be one thing if this were just a quasi-Marxist academic movement, but it has gone far beyond that. The University of Pennsylvania Center for Guaranteed Income Research (yes, another one) finds that more than 30 U.S. cities have adopted UBI pilot programs.

And now, with AI supposedly about to destroy all jobs but four (the CEOs of the AI giants), UBI is being touted as the panacea to the AI “jobapocalypse.” The sad part is that this movement has gotten much of its financial support and credibility from Silicon Valley, which should know better than to fan the flames of AI fear with offers of welfare payments.

Former Facebook co-founder and funder of all sorts of anti-corporate activities, Chris Hughes, was one of the original funders of the Economic Security Project, which supports research and cultural engagement around guaranteed income and contributed millions to the Stockton, California, UBI experiment.

A recent op-ed in The Hill titled “The US is headed for mass unemployment, and no one is prepared” called for, you guessed it, UBI. But be assured the author, John Mac Ghlionn, is not some crazy Marxist. No, he writes for the New York Post and once upon a time The American Conservative (which raises the question: What has the conservative movement come to?).

Ghlionn tells us he’s a conservative who was mugged by reality: “Something fundamental has shifted, and pretending otherwise is nothing short of denial. The AI revolution is here, and it’s gutting entire sectors with hurricane force.”

Really? A hurricane of job destruction? This must explain why the rate of job loss from downsizing and closures in the first quarter of 2025 (the latest data) was the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting the data in 1995. It must also explain why the unemployment rate was just 4.3 percent in January of this year, more than a percentage point lower than the 50-year average.

The sad thing is that 47 percent of the article’s readers, responding to the poll asking whether they support UBI, said they do.

Oh, but wait—the job apocalypse is coming. Really, it is. Geoffrey Hinton says so.

Well, leaving aside the myth that AI will displace all jobs (which I will address in future posts), what’s wrong with UBI?

Where to begin?

How about the fact that the longer people are out of the labor market, the longer they tend to stay out. UBI is welfare, although supporters avoid that term like the plague because welfare is stigmatized as people getting money for nothing. But who can be opposed to UBI? It’s universal. It’s basic. And it’s income.

But for many UBI supporters, being out of the labor market is the point. Why bother working, especially when you are an “oppressed proletariat,” when you can do nothing and have the Man pay for it?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my kids living in a Ready Player One–style world where they play video games all day while eating dried seaweed.

Rather than UBI welfare, the task, as ITIF has laid out, is to improve federal worker adjustment assistance programs.

But even if we agreed that UBI is beneficial, what’s the rush? Wake me when unemployment—in a non-recessionary quarter—exceeds 10 percent. By the way, that will not happen, and I am on record willing to bet anyone that it won’t.

If we really do see AI enabling large numbers of jobs to be automated (and according to the Congressional Budget Office that isn’t happening anytime soon), and if the lump-of-labor fallacy somehow turns out not to be a fallacy, and additional jobs are not created from the lower prices generated by AI-driven automation, it is still not clear why there would be a problem.

If AI can do all the work, then the price of everything falls toward almost nothing: A car for $50 and a haircut for 10 cents. If that is the case, and if people can cobble together 10 or 20 hours of work a year, they can live quite well.

But in any case, until we get to 10 percent unemployment, please stop bothering us with this socialist nonsense.