By Robert Tracinski
Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Voters in Switzerland just resoundingly defeated a
referendum calling for a guaranteed minimum income that would have required the
government to send a check to every Swiss citizen every month for as much as
2,500 francs, or a little more than $30,000 per year. That’s a solid lower- to
middle-class income — for doing nothing.
There are two ways of looking at this news. We can
applaud the Swiss for being sensible enough to reject a load of pernicious
nonsense. Or we can be appalled that in a productive and orderly society,
nearly a quarter of the population was ready to vote to make itself a ward of
the state.
Because that’s the issue here.
The idea of a guaranteed minimum income has been gaining
some popularity recently, oddly among libertarians, as a more efficient form of
welfare spending. The idea is that welfare money that goes through traditional
means-tested programs like SNAP (formerly known as “food stamps”) is eaten up
by bureaucracy, diverted by fraud, and subject to paternalistic edicts in which
government dictates how its beneficiaries get to spend money (this much for
housing, this much for food, and so on) when these people could (probably)
spend it more helpfully by making their own decisions.
This is a good example of where today’s libertarians tend
to go wrong, refusing to see the forest for the trees. It’s the same sort of
backward reasoning — trying to find more efficient, “market-oriented” ways of
administering a vast regulatory and welfare state — that gave us carbon credit
trading and health insurance mandates.
Because increasing the efficiency of the welfare state
isn’t really the issue, particularly in the case of the Swiss referendum.
The idea of a guaranteed minimum income involves an
instructive set of tradeoffs: the Basic Income Impossible Trinity. You can do
two of three things but not all three. You can have the basic income be a
generous transfer of wealth that provides its recipients with an actual,
comfortable living rather than a pittance. You can avoid means-testing and not
phase out the minimum income as recipients make more money, to avoid penalizing
work. Or you can have the system be affordable and not require massive tax
increases.
The Swiss campaigners wanted the first two: a really big
guaranteed income capable of providing a middle-class living and no phase out,
so that there would be no penalty for working. But they didn’t really have an
answer for how anyone was going to pay for it. Perhaps they hoped that, because
the guaranteed income is provided to Swiss citizens only, the country’s large
number of foreign workers — about a quarter of Swiss residents — would foot
much of the bill. Or they dabbled in science-fiction musings about Star Trek
replicators or about how the robots will do the work for us.
And they had a really stupendously big poster, which is
always super-convincing.
The central problem is not just the obvious: if income is
separated from work, there is little or no incentive for anyone to do any work.
It’s actually worse than that. The deeper problem is an actual punishment for
working. This is a well-known problem called the “welfare wall.” As a person
goes from not working to working, the loss of welfare benefits functions as an
enormous tax on his earnings; in some cases making him worse off than if he
stayed home and sat on the couch.
The Swiss version was supposed to avoid this by having no
phase out, paying the same minimum to absolutely everyone, so if you choose to
work, you get even more. But that comes with an obvious claw-back in the form
of higher taxes. One of the ideas floated to pay for the guaranteed income was
a 100 percent consumption tax. In other words, we’ll give you a check every
month, but then take most of it back by doubling the price of everything in the
stores. It creates the same welfare wall, only perhaps worse. It guarantees
that for everyone, each additional franc earned is worth a lot less than it was
before the government “helped” them.
So this supposedly compassionate system punishes people
for attempting to be productive and self-supporting and instead encourages a
life of idleness.
But remember the Law of Intended Consequences. Maybe the
life of idleness is the point. Let’s go back to that really big Swiss poster.
What it says (in English, interestingly) is, “What Would You Do If Your Income
Were Taken Care Of?” (Grammar aficionados, note the rather spectacular use of
the passive voice. Your income is “taken care of,” and we are not invited to
inquire who is taking care of it.) The actual sales pitch for the referendum
was not about alleviating poverty. It was about asking people to imagine what
they would do with all of their spare time if they could permanently skive off
of work. It was about paying people to dabble in their hobbies.
A review of a Swiss film that puts the guaranteed income
on the agenda sums up its message:
Schmidt and Häni’s film…is fairly
unapologetic about admitting that, yes, if you adopt guaranteed income, some
people simply won’t work. The film estimates that, under a basic-income plan,
sixty per cent of workers would keep their jobs, thirty per cent would work
part-time, and ten per cent would do something entirely different and not what
we think of now as a regular “job.” And that’s OK. Or better than OK — it’s
part of the point. “The most interesting implication of the basic income,” the
Swiss actress Bettina Dieterle says in the film-essay, “is that when I die I
will no longer be able to say, ‘I could not do what I wanted.'” This is Marxism
Lite. If the unfulfilled promise of Marxism included “from each according to
his ability,” Grundeinkommen is more “from each according to how much he or she
feels like putting in today.”
Remember how Obamacare was going to liberate the
job-locked poets? Nancy Pelosi promised, “If you want to be creative and be a
musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your
skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.” This
is the Swiss idea on a more ambitious scale.
This is the flipside of all those pompous graduation
speeches encouraging young people to “follow your passion” (after encouraging
them to take on massive student loans they will have to toil the rest of their
lives to pay off). The promise here is follow your passion, and we’ll get
someone else to pay for you to do it.
I have long had the theory that the modern welfare state,
particularly in Europe, is a kind of democratized aristocracy. The basic moral
idea behind aristocracy was that work and toil are ignoble — ugly necessities
best left to the lower sorts — while the privileged few lived in opulence
without working, free to pursue higher callings like science, art, politics,
and betting on horses. In practice, of course, the number of aristocrats who
liked to bet on horses was much larger than the number who wrote deathless
literature.
The modern European welfare state accepts this outlook
but asks, “Why should this ideal be attainable only by a privileged few? Why can’t
we democratize aristocracy and give everyone the right to pursue a life of
leisure?” Of course, the privilege gets thinner the farther out you spread it,
so we can go only part of the way. Let’s start with six weeks of summer
vacation and build from there.
The Swiss referendum was an attempt to go the rest of the
way, to induct all Swiss citizens into an aristocratic leisure class entitled
to live comfortably off of the work of others. The unavoidable contradiction is
that if you extend this sense of entitlement to everyone, there will be no one
left to pay for it. And the attempt to get closer and closer to the goal of
everybody-consuming-and-nobody-producing merely piles the prospect of economic
disaster on top of an insufferable sense of entitlement.
The guaranteed basic income may be a better way of
distributing welfare looked at from within very narrow economic blinders. But
the principle behind it and the cultural precedent it sets are disasters.
Traditional welfare distributes money to people for specific needs and may
involve a lot of bureaucracy, fraud, and paternalism; but at least it preserves
the idea that money from the government should be an exception, a response to
some special emergency. Yet that’s never what welfare advocates really had in
mind, and the guaranteed minimum income brings this out into the open. It
reveals the endgame of the welfare state: welfare as a way of life, a
neo-aristocratic privilege of living without working.
The Swiss were wise to reject this specific proposal, but
we can expect the same idea to keep coming back in new forms until people
reject the neo-aristocratic mentality behind it.
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