Last Chance Moonshot — Part 1: Basic Income

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)

The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.

F.A. Hayek (1979)

I’m in *favor* of universal basic income. Goal of government should be to maximize the happiness of the people. Giving each person money allows them to decide what meets their needs, rather than the blunt tool of legislation, which creates self-serving special interests. If we do a stimulus at all, it should just be direct payments to consumers.

Elon Musk (2020)

We’re a couple weeks into “Trump 2: Revenge of the Killer Clown,” and Project 2025, that weird thing that Trump had barely even heard of (honest, he swears!), is ramping up its national makeover. Tariffs, aid cutoffs, brown people roundups, erasure of all sexual deviants, blaming Obama for a tragic plane crash — the new administration is off to an impressive rollout of cruelty, lying, grandstanding, and medieval bloodlust posing as Christian piety. Trump is essentially embarking on a giant project of social engineering, a futile attempt to turn the United States into a theocratic, post-democratic, ethnically pure Galt’s Gulch, where the rules of modern economics and the ecological law of limits are suspended, where regular white guys can finally have their Stepford fantasies fulfilled.

In the previous two posts on this blog ( here and here), I laid out why I don’t think that the Dems should go chasing the working class as a primary strategy, nor should they just portray themselves as Trump-resisters, in hopes that the American political pendulum will swing back their way in 2026 and 2028. I instead urged liberals to swing for the fences, with a bold new plan for the future, a plan as audacious, in its own way, as the fever-dreams of Trumpism. This post, and the two that follow, will outline the three stool legs of that proposed plan, a project that, I think, stands the best chance for pulling us back from the brink.

A New Role for the State

Cicero wrote that “freedom is participation in power.” In the modern world of consumer-industrial civilization, one thing, above all others, defines power: money. All nations, whether nominally capitalist, socialist, communist, or otherwise, must deal with the overriding reality of global markets, where money is the medium for all exchanges, and thus the fulcrum of power. Money creates the power to shape reality, the ability to define the contours of individual lives, local and national communities, and the pathways of technological and social change. Even the loftiest, noblest of causes will be stillborn if it cannot mobilize money on a regular and ongoing basis.

In this context, the primary role of government should not be to guarantee liberty, or property rights, or access to education, or defense from foreign enemies, or full employment, or preservation of culture. These are all now secondary purposes for a political system. The primary function of government should now be to provide DIRECT ACCESS to money, through a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Only UBI can provide the conditions where people can directly create an economy that serves their needs, which is the prerequisite for producing any kind of just, sustainable, safe, and sane society.

Governments today are living in the past, where they can only envision the empowerment of people INDIRECTLY, through a layer of obfuscation, a murky veneer in our social atmosphere, where all manner of archaic ideology is mummified and preserved. In this antiquated model of government, we can only empower people by enacting tangential policies, like cutting or raising taxes, providing job training, applying or limiting regulations, welcoming or eliminating immigrant labor, and liberalizing or protecting trade.

Every major government action, both liberal and conservative, is aimed at some intervening entity or idea: economic growth, full employment, inflation control, interest rates, consumer confidence, housing starts, union membership, minimum wage requirements, redistributive taxation. All these actions are designed to improve the conditions of the economic landscape, with the assumption that this is the best proxy for making people’s lives better, or, to be more precise, to give people the opportunity to make their lives better.

Anything and everything is done to avoid just doing what we have to do: GIVE PEOPLE MONEY. No intermediaries, no third party actors, no cloudy layer of stats and percentages — just give people money, no strings attached, with no end. The reasons for NOT implementing a Universal Basic Income are not convincing anymore, and they have no relation to new realities that now apply. These new realities include:

• We don’t need to compel labor anymore, nor should we pursue full employment. With our cascading ecological catastrophes, we basically have to reduce everything: less labor, less consumption, less growth, less production, less impact overall. In this context, people withdrawing from the workforce, as enabled by UBI, is good, a prerequisite for any hope in halting the destructive juggernaut of the current system.
• Labor and human skill have become uncoupled from both morality and monetary compensation (if they were ever truly that connected to begin with). Vast inequalities in wealth and income, combined with the kinds of economic activity that now garner the hugest rewards, make a mockery of any attempt to equate social worth and individual effort with monetary recompense. The moldy old Puritan idea of labor as a moral training ground has been swept into the grimy gutters of our winner-take-all, hyper-capitalist cage fight.
• The upshot of these two major developments is that money does not need to be scarce for regular people anymore. The only reason to keep money scarce for regular people is to compel labor and to heap rewards on the private providers of extra money that people need because their wages don’t stretch far enough (i.e., banks and other lenders). Since labor does not need to be compelled, and because people still need money to live, the logical policy solution is UBI.
• If UBI is the only logical solution to the changing landscape of labor value and money, then the government needs to make a major shift, to support people directly with money, instead of using banks as intermediaries.

The layer of obfuscation between government action and people’s general welfare is where all injustice, unfairness, inequality, and exploitation are birthed, nurtured, and endlessly fed. It’s where Trump lurks, where Musk slithers, and where every billionaire, oligarch, demagogue, and global titan live and breathe. When government does not empower people by giving them money directly, then nothing can halt the accelerating ecological destruction churned out by the infinite-growth machine.

Money has become the only mechanism through which we can accomplish the change we urgently need: rapid reduction of consumption, economic contraction done in a sustainable way, reduced workforce participation, and transcending the dead-end of political and cultural polarization.

Essentially, what we’re seeing is the collapse of the nation-state/capitalism marriage, because the threads of democracy and economic justice have become tattered and ragged. The iron laws of profit and infinite growth have overwhelmed the archaic political machinery of the state and the obsolete moralizing from an earlier economic age. In this context, a democratic republic like ours must radically change, or else succumb to the outlandish fantasies of despots and religious zealots.

Democrats and liberals need a new battle cry, an epoch-making declaration that the time of hoping for table crumbs and trickle down from the plutocrats is over. No longer will the government serve the interests of the people only indirectly, through opaque layers of economic misdirection and moral exploitation, where tyrants and demagogues spin out their sticky webs of deceit and injustice. Universal Basic Income will strike a deathblow to this morass of corruption, and set the stage for a new chapter in our history.

Next Time: Bigger Home Bases — where UBI comes to life

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on February 2, 2025.