Argument for UBI

17 April 2026 · 5 min read

MY ARGUMENT FOR UBI:

AI and automation are decoupling productivity from labor. Companies produce more, workers earn less.

Consumer spending is 70% of the economy¹. You can't automate production and also kill the consumer base. Who buys the stuff the robots make if nobody has money?

So either we redistribute, or we get mass demand collapse. No third option.

UBI is the redistribution mechanism². $2k a month to every American³. Not a wage replacement, it's fuel for keeping cash spinning.

You cannot just drop cash into the current economy. Landlords and insurance companies and utilities will eat the whole thing. You give someone $2k and their rent goes up $2k the next month.

BEFORE the cash shows up, you have to decommodify the stuff people can't opt out of buying. Housing, utilities, healthcare, basic food. Free or near-free.

We can do this now. 3D printing housing, nuclear and thorium for energy, automated agriculture. The tech is basically ready. The bottleneck is regulatory and political, not material.

Nobody understands how good the tech has gotten.

Nationalize the natural monopolies⁴.

Electricity, water, internet, and honestly at this point the AI labs. Anthropic/OpenAI/Google are going the way of pre-war rail and steel and it always ends the same way. Only America can do this first.

The petrodollar is what makes it possible, we can expand the money supply without hyperinflating because the whole world absorbs dollars. Any other country trying this gets wrecked.

We go first or nobody goes.
Once the cash is flowing, Americans become the merchant class of the world. Take your $2k, stack a few months, go do a business adventure in Vietnam. Digital nomads was the preview. At scale it's every American who wants it.

And once income isn't chained to job location, people self-sort into the communities they actually want to live in. The "they're gonna flood my neighborhood" fear dissolves because nobody has to go where the job is anymore.

Right now most people work out of desperation, not choice. You take the shitty job because the alternative is homelessness. That's coercion, labor isn't really voluntary under those conditions. UBI is the first time in human history that work would be actually voluntary⁵.

You could say no to the exploitative boss. You could walk. That's what ties to the closing line about ending slavery, wage coercion is a vestige of slavery.

Every developed country is in demographic free-fall. South Korea is at 0.72⁶. People aren't having kids because they can't afford them, period. Every "pronatalist" policy short of UBI fails. If you want kids to be born, you have to make kids economically possible. This is the angle that converts chuds who care about family formation, only policy that actually addresses the root cause.

Saving isn't evil but current savings culture is. The $2k is meant to spin through the economy. The incentive to save comes back as a voluntary national pool⁷, think public S&P you can add your UBI into. Keeps spending velocity while letting people build real wealth.

The economics is solid. The hard part is the politics. Landlords, insurance, healthcare, oil, every extractive interest fights every phase. They own most of the legislative chokepoints.

But we were annoying about banning slavery, banning alcohol, giving women the vote⁸. This is the fight now⁹. You have to be annoying about it. The nihilism is what kills it, not the math.

UBI unleashes entrepreneurship. Most Americans are trapped in bullshit jobs¹⁰ because quitting to start something means you lose healthcare and the mortgage eats you alive in 3 months. Universal basic income means millions of people can take the risk. We're leaving staggering amounts of human capital on the table because the downside of quitting is catastrophic. This is the angle that converts libertarians, it's a pro-market argument, not an anti-market one.

Crime drops, carceral state shrinks. People in survival mode do survival crime. Property crime, drug dealing, fraud, the base rate tracks poverty so tightly it's basically the same line. UBI means you can downsize police, prisons, probation systems.

Communism abolishes private property¹¹. UBI universalizes ownership, every American gets a share of the AUTOMATED COMMONWEALTH, on top of whatever else they build. It's capitalism that finally works because the capital-owning class is everyone. You're not abolishing markets, you're giving everyone enough buying power that markets can actually function, this is a true revolution.

The timeline is short. This isn't a 2050 problem. The graphic designers are already getting laid off. Junior software engineers are next. Truckers, paralegals, customer service, 5 to 10 years, not 50.

The thing people keep missing is that "AI is coming for jobs" isn't hypothetical, it's a trend line you can draw from 2023 layoffs to now. The longer we wait the uglier the transition.

The alternative to UBI isn't the status quo, it's neo-feudalism¹². A tiny owner class holding automated production + a vast underclass with no labor value and no way to eat. That's the attractor state if we do nothing. People keep comparing UBI to the world we currently have. We're not going to keep having this world. The choice is UBI or warlords, this is the point of divergence.

Inflation doesn't happen if you sequence it right. Every critic jumps to Weimar¹³ but that only happens if you print money into a scarcity economy. If housing is decommodified and energy is automated and food is automated, the supply curve stretches with the money supply. 1970s stagflation happened because OPEC¹⁴ squeezed supply while fiscal expansion was hitting. You don't skip phase 1.

China is the geopolitical forcing function¹⁵. They're automating faster than we are and they have political capacity to retool their economy top-down. If America doesn't transition to a post-labor consumption economy we lose the 21st century. Our comparative advantage is the dollar and our ability to do big redistributive programs when we actually try. We have to play to our strengths or get outcompeted.

"But what will people DO all day?"

They'll do the work that was always underpaid. Care work, art, community building, raising kids, teaching, repair, hospitality, gardens, local journalism. The most meaningful labor has always been compensated badly because the market never priced it correctly. UBI is how that work finally gets done.

Slavery is not a virtue, we can end slavery, this is our out, we did it together, collectively, and we'll reap the profits, collectively.

Notes

By the editor.

Personal consumption expenditures were 67.9% of US GDP in 2024 (annual, BEA via FRED), and have stayed near 68% since, so 70% is a fair rounding. It is the figure behind her "who buys the stuff the robots make" question. source ↩
Thomas Paine proposed it in Agrarian Justice (1797): a national fund paying every person £15 at twenty-one and £10 a year from fifty, as compensation for the natural inheritance of land that private owners had enclosed. It was to be funded by a tax on inherited estates. UBI's oldest argument is that the commons belongs to everyone. source ↩
Andrew Yang's Freedom Dividend, the best-known US proposal, was $1,000 a month for every adult in his 2019-20 campaign, framed as an answer to automation and paid for by a value-added tax. Her figure doubles it, and she adds a prior step Yang did not: decommodify housing and healthcare first. source ↩
America has done this at scale. From 26 December 1917 until March 1920 the United States Railroad Administration ran about 360,000 miles of track and more than two million workers as one wartime system. Amtrak (1971) and Conrail (1976) were created after the Penn Central bankruptcy. source ↩
The best US test is the Stockton SEED trial: 125 residents received $500 a month for 24 months with no conditions. In the first year, full-time employment among recipients rose from 28% to 40%, against 32% to 37% in the control group. It was small, and Finland's larger 2017-18 trial (2,000 unemployed people, 560 euros a month) found no significant employment effect in its first year, but higher life satisfaction and less strain. source ↩
South Korea's total fertility rate (births per woman) was 0.72 in 2023, the world's lowest, per Statistics Korea. It rose to 0.75 in 2024, the first increase in nine years. ↩
Alaska has run one for decades. The Permanent Fund was set up in 1976 from oil revenue, and since 1982 it has paid every qualifying resident an annual dividend out of its earnings. The first cheque was $1,000. source ↩
Each took long persistence. Women's suffrage ran 72 years from Seneca Falls (1848) to the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). Prohibition took effect in 1920 after the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in January 1919, and was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment on 5 December 1933. source ↩
Guaranteed income has been a movement before. Martin Luther King argued for it in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), and Nixon's Family Assistance Plan of 1969, a negative income tax guaranteeing a family of four $1,600 a year, passed the House but died in the Senate. source ↩
The phrase is David Graeber's, from Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), which argues that much paid work is pointless and psychologically harmful. Graeber proposed universal basic income as one remedy. Her related claim, that man was not born to labour, is argued in The Point of Civilization Is Utopia. ↩
She distinguishes her own communism from the classical kind in The Point of Civilization Is Utopia, where she says the goal is not to enshrine labour but to free people from necessity. Here the same aim is stated in policy: ownership of the automated economy for everyone. ↩
Two recent books use the word. Joel Kotkin's The Coming of Neo-Feudalism (2020) warns of a tech-billionaire ruling class and a dependent majority; Kotkin himself opposes UBI. Yanis Varoufakis's Technofeudalism (2023) argues that platform rents have replaced markets and profit as the engine of the economy. source ↩
The Weimar hyperinflation (1921-23) wrecked the German papiermark. By November 1923 one US dollar was worth about 4.2 trillion marks. Causes included war debt, reparations and money printing during the 1923 Ruhr occupation. ↩
The 1973 oil embargo, led by Arab members of OAPEC during the Yom Kippur War, roughly quadrupled oil prices. It helped bring the 1973-75 recession together with high inflation. ↩
China installed 276,288 industrial robots in 2023, about 51% of the world's 541,302 new installations, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Its 2025 report puts China's 2024 installations at 295,000, or 54% of the global total. source ↩