Remember Universal Basic Income? UBI was, like, the biggest thing ever, in left-wing circles for a while. Bigger than Bernie Sanders, Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled into one, big Frankensocialist. Bigger than Hugo Chavez impregnating Jacinda Ardern from beyond the grave with some kind of mutant leftist demon-seed.
But they’ve gone awfully quiet about UBI lately. Maybe because they’ve swung back to Ol’ Reliable, climate change. Maybe because the Wuhan Plague occupied their tiny reserve of cognitive RAM for the last year.
Or maybe because we’ve seen the UBI future – and it worked about as well as the Soviet Union.
Finland, the left’s favourite Nordic utopia (at least, until they started kicking out African and Muslim freeloaders), actually tried UBI. They gave it up after just a year.
But it’s not just the saintly Nordics who’ve trialled UBI. For the past year, many Western governments have used the Wuhan pandemic as the rationale for trialling UBI in all but name. Governments who rendered people unable to work with the stroke of a pen, compensated by paying them to not work.
So how’s it working?
Florida officials announced an end to the $300 weekly federal pandemic unemployment compensation supplement on May 24, making the Sunshine State the 23rd state to opt out of the jobless boost in a bid to encourage people to get back to work amid a labor shortage and a booming economy.
Australia likewise ended its “coronavirus supplement” on unemployment benefits (which never really answered the question of just why the government was paying people already not working, twice as much to keep not working). One reason cited was that it just wasn’t needed: unemployment actually dropped after the main pandemic panic had passed. But while it showed that some workers were keen to get back in the pre-COVID saddle, it was also partly because other people just stopped even looking for work.
It was even more obvious in US states like Florida.
The decision to withdraw from the jobless boost was in part prompted by April labor market data, which showed that total private-sector employment in Florida increased by 18,800 jobs, with nearly half a million job postings available in the state for job seekers[…]
Florida business leaders have been sounding the alarm on hiring difficulties.
“Even though our industry is open for business, we are facing a dire labor shortage,” Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association President and CEO, Carol Dover, said in a statement. “Strong demand, coupled with this staffing shortage, has left many businesses forced to limit operating days and hours in addition to reducing capacity in both food service and lodging[…]
With the move, Florida joins 22 other Republican-led states in dropping the $300 weekly federal jobless benefit boost sometime this summer—all in a bid to encourage employment amid sky-high levels of job openings and business hiring woes.
The Epoch Times
This was always what seemed to non-leftists to be the obvious flaw of UBI: if we started paying everyone not to work, why would anyone bother working at all? In which case, who would pay the taxes to fund UBI?
Not to worry, the UBI enthusiasts burbled. UBI will unleash a wave of creativity and entrepreneurialism! After all, no one wants to sit on the couch and play video games and watch Netflix all day.
Except, that’s exactly what a great many people seem to want to do.
As Finland reported, “giving jobless people in Finland a basic income for two years did not lead them to find work”. While some UBI recipients found work, they were no more likely to do so than a control group of people who weren’t given the money. Finnish experts are still trying to work out exactly why this is.
Rumour has it that they’re consulting Professor Obvious of the No-Shit-Sherlock Institute, in search of the answer.
Still, the UBI recipients reported being “happier” while they got paid to laze around in their pyjamas all day.
Well, I never.
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