An Interesting Idea?

We were reading a long article on the idea of paying everyone a basic income that lets them live decently, rather than having a huge infrastructure of “helping” government payments, like disability, social security, the various rent subsidies, food stamps, school grants, the Veteran’s Administration, mortgage supplements hand-outs and what-not. Instead everyone (“everyone” and “how much” to be defined later) would get a monetary salary and would pay for their food, lodging and so on out of that. There would be no strings, just like a salary, people would be free to spend it on education, health care and housing, or cocaine and hookers.

You&Me thinks that’s an intriguing idea. What is especially compelling is that it would remove the stigma of needing assistance, most likely lead to a more even health care delivery system, and when it’s been tried in the past, seems to help people be less stressed and make more future oriented choices with their money. It would also solve the problem that most of the money being earmarked to help people mostly helps pay the salaries of the giant bureaucracy created to administer the funds.

We see two big problems—besides paying for it. One is that some people just can’t help themselves from trying to control other people’s lives “for their own good.” Spend it on hookers and blow! We can’t have that! Will no one think of the children!” and so on. An even bigger problem would be getting all those government agencies to give up control—in order to stay in business they would insist their group is “special” and they need to keep their hands on the purse strings. Christopher Buckley wrote a book, “Boomsday” a few years ago. It’s kind of a mess as a book, maybe two stars, but it does give a great explication of how a proposed government social program gets torpedoed by special interests and political power grabbing.