This spring Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes asked Fed chair Jerome Powell, “And you believe the system, because of the oversight of the Fed, has the wherewithal to stand a significant shock to the markets?” 

The idea of universal basic income (UBI) is near the peak of the hype cycle. Democrat Andrew Yang made it the flagship issue of his presidential campaign. A small industry of advocates tirelessly push arguments in its favor. I will address two in this piece. The first: the claim of permanent elimination of jobs. The second: the resulting need for income to compensate for the fall in purchasing power from the lack of work. Both rely on long-discarded economic fallacies. 

Nothing will come of nothing.
Shakespeare, King Lear

If, as we are often told, the aim of art is to shock the bourgeoisie, then the contemporary art scene has become positively electric of late. In the most recent aesthetic outrage, a Sardinian artist named Salvatore Garau managed to sell an invisible sculpture, known simply as “I am,” to an anonymous buyer, as reported by the Daily Mail on June 3, 2021.

These days it’s not your typical latte-sipping millennials who are going woke. Taking a stroll around America’s largest metro areas will have one believe social justice is the latest fad that’s sweeping across corporate boardrooms. Much has been written about woke capital—businesses’ recent pivot to signal their affinity for leftist movements—and what it means for society at large. Suffice it to say that since last year, this trend has accelerated at breakneck speeds.

Twenty twenty was the year college changed forever. How many US universities have been mortally wounded?

Covid was the pretense. But the writing was on the wall for decades. Skyrocketing tuition. Useless majors and degrees. Leftist ideologues masquerading as professors. Woke curricula instead of rigor and truth. Many students leave with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. And for countless graduates, little to show for it all in terms of marketable skills or job prospects.

Outside of the D.C. Beltway, state capitols and city halls, bureaucrats receive something less than adulation from citizens. And libertarians often lead the chorus. But some bureau employees are necessary. One libertarian who recognized this long ago was Leonard Read, in “The Worrycrats,” part of his 1972 To Free or to Freeze.

Even when government is limited to codifying the taboos, invoking a common justice, and keeping the peace, there is…an operating staff: a bureaucracy…[following] procedures.

It has often been asserted that we should cooperate rather than compete in society. For instance, FDR said, “Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.” Bertrand Russell expressed it even more sharply when he said, “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.”

Large-scale unemployment is another name for a surplus in the labor market. Equilibrium is a state which markets will naturally move toward as buyers and sellers look for mutually advantageous exchanges. Firms can always get some value from additional labor, even under pessimistic forecasts of sale prices and quantities. Workers earning zero wages can improve their situation by accepting a job—even if they do not accept the first offer. Therefore, a labor market in surplus will absorb unemployed labor at a lower wage.