Some folks think the world owes them a living.
Must we appease them?
Should government hand every man, woman and child a check each month to make sure we’re all taken care of?
Finland is embracing this basic idea with a pilot program, providing everyone an “unconditional basic income” (UBI). Treating citizens equally is enshrined in Finland’s constitution, so every Finn will receive the same 800-euros a month without regard to income or lack thereof.
It sounds like Democrat George McGovern’s “guaranteed annual income,” which was mocked and ridiculed during the 1972 presidential campaign.
But you might be surprised who has supported the UBI: free-market economist Milton Friedman advanced the similar “negative income tax” back in 1962; Martin Luther King liked it; Austrian economist F. A. Hayek endorsed the concept; Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground, has developed a version of the proposal.
The rationale? Save money by consolidating duplicative welfare programs. After all, the U.S. government runs 79 means-tested benefit programs, each with its costly, redundant bureaucracy.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps, Finland’s social engineers think the move will increase employment. Why? Because welfare benefits currently can be withdrawn when Finns gain employment and the attendant income, which discourages folks from risking their secure base benefits.
That’s the case here, too.
The government passing out money — our money — stinks. Folks should take care of themselves, or depend on charity — not confiscatory taxation. Yet, if this version of a safety net does indeed encourage industry, employment, and good old-fashioned money-making amongst the poor … it may very well be a step in the right direction.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Finland on 800-Euros-a-Month”
I guess it may be worth a try, the other attempts at welfare schemes have not worked except to provide perverse incentives. They have proven to be more harmful than helpful over the long run.
As an aside, I suspect Finland does not have an open immigration policy.
The Fair tax does this in a way with the tax prebate which will only go to citizens. All are taxed on what they spend. We still would have to curtail the unemployment/welfare system.
We are already in an era where machines, computer controlled in many cases, are replacing human workers. As a matter of fact, without government “protection” of certain groups in our society, we’d already be seeing more and more people being effectively replaced by advanced computer software. For example, you can learn a great deal that used to be the “preserve” of licensed professionals. All of this indicates that in the near future, without the “protection” of government enforced monopoly, that more and more people will be able to take care of things that they used to have to pay others to do for them.
Increasing amounts of technological unemployment will mean that we will need fewer people to do even those tasks now reserved for the highly educated. And robotics are improving just as computer technology is. Meaning again that more and more tasks once performed by people will be in the relatively near future will be performed by cybernetic devices of one sort or another.
This likely means that large numbers of people, likely those on the left side of the “bell curve” will become functionally obsolete so far as most ordinary tasks are concerned. In which case the creation of some sort of “economic support system” similar to the UBI will become necessary.