Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the fifth richest person in the world, has called for a universal basic income (UBI), even for people who don’t work. He and other billionaires such as Elon Musk say paying a guaranteed minimum “wage” would provide a cushion to help people try new ideas outside the 9-to-5 grind.
Despite many leaders’ dismissal of the concept as Marxist, several industrialized nations have moved beyond the debate stage. In 2015, Finland’s millionaire Prime Minister Juha Sipila said providing basic income to people would make the social security system less complex—a single government payment instead of many programs. The country instituted a two-year pilot program in 2017 that provided 800 euros per month to a group of jobless or skill-less people. But the project sample now involves too few recipients to show much universality, and organizers currently state the only aim is to coax people into accepting low-paying jobs.
Proponents still insist that nationwide implementation of UBI in Finland would streamline social security, as well as put to rest another bugbear in Finnish welfare: People sometimes refuse work in order to receive more handouts.
Swiss voters considered the idea in a national referendum in 2016, and 78 percent cast a “no” ballot. Daniel Straub, Swiss co-chairman of The Peoples Initiative for an Unconditional Basic Income told me,…
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