Thomas Paine (1736-1809) was an American founding father whose influential ideas and pamphlets (The American Crise and Common Sense) led to one of the most iconic and impactful revolutions of all time. Common Sense was published on January 10 1776, the book displayed Paine’s ideas of an independent country free of British rule and sold 500,000 copies during the American Revolution (2.5 million – U.S. population 1776). Paine’s ideas of an independent world were a driver behind a revolution that has shaped the modern world and governments today. However, as we go forward into the future, perhaps a forgotten and unknown idea of Thomas Paine will be more important in shaping the new world than we had realized. In 1797, Thomas Paine released another pamphlet titled “Agrarian Justice” In this pamphlet, Paine developed an idea that every individual turning 21 should receive £15 and £10 every year after turning 50. Paine’s view was quite simple:

“Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made, but it has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.”

Paine believed in the virtues of capitalism that he fought for, but he wanted to fill the leaky cracks in the ceiling that could come with the benefits of an American society. More than 100 years after “Agrarian Justice” several individuals shared the idea of a universal basic income: Economist Henry George, Senator Huey Long, and even Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed the idea of a Universal Basic Income. The first known experiment was called the “Mincome” and it came around in Manitoba, Canada, when cash for low-income families and individuals was provided. The same experiment was provided in the United States under the “Negative Income Tax Experiments”. UBI was catching a wave as then-president Richard Nixon pushed for a federal law that provided income to U.S. citizens as long as it came with work incentives.

.“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis.

Although there was some support, a case for UBI diminished and was long forgotten, until 2019 when a man by the name of Andrew Yang threw his hat in the ring for Presidency in the 2020 US election. Andrew Yang’s case for UBI wasn’t mainly for helping low-income families or to help the economy, but rather for the fear that jobs in America and the world will soon be obsolete. In Andrew Yang’s book “The War on Normal People (2017)” Andrew stated frightening stats in terms of the future projections of income and job security of blue-collar and white-collar jobs.

• Automation has already eliminated about 4 million manufacturing jobs in the United States since 2000.

• Jobs in manufacturing for people with graduate degrees grew by 32%, even as overall employment in the sector was plummeting.

• Automation eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2015, four times more than globalization.

• The chances that Americans born in 1990 will earn more than their parents are down 50%; for Americans born in 1940 the same figure was 92%

• A survey in 2017 found that 59% of Americans don’t have the savings to pay an unexpected expense of $500. The Federal Reserve reporting in 2015 said that 75% of Americans could not pay a $400 emergency expense out of their chequing or savings accounts.

All these stats were written in the first 50 pages. Though the numbers seem to only affect the blue-collar workers, Andrew Yang confirmed that white-collar jobs are in jeopardy as well, on page 50, he told the story of an experiment of experienced doctors’ ability to detect a tumor compared to a computer and the doctors were outmatched by the computer. Recently, a robot was set to portray a lawyer in court to fight a traffic ticket, however, the creator behind the robot was threatened with a jail sentence by “State Bar Prosecutors” if he continued with the experiment. The reason for the threat? A.I robots replacing their jobs. The day when robots take over may seem to be a ways away, but I believe this quote from Ernest Hemmingway’s book The sun also rises (1926), is a good indicator of the future. A character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

So with blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs in jeopardy and college degrees becoming more useless, what is Yang’s solution? $1000 a month for every American over 18.

A common question that Yang received was “How are you going to pay for that?”, Yang’s strategy was a Value Added Tax of 10% that would’ve covered the payment of UBI. Yang wasn’t the only one in the century to advocate for a UBI, Rodger Malcolm Mitchell wrote a book Free Money (2005) that advocated for a policy called Modern Monetary Theory, in which governments have the power to create their own currency, could do so to implement policies to support the citizens in many ways including UBI. The MMT member Stephanie Kelton stated “What makes a currency valid is a proclamation of the state that it will be accepted at its pay offices: what makes it acceptable to its citizenry is usefulness in settling these liabilities” She further borrowed an example from George Knapp, in which he explains how we receive a ticket at the coat room in a theatre and the only way to get our coats back is by this ticket. There is nothing special about the ticket, it’s just that the theatre proclaimed that the ticket is significant. This is no different with money. Economist Jim Rickards explains MMT’s message in his book “Aftermath” of using the treasury as a way to pay for this policy:

“MMT theorizing is not merely abstract; it is means to an end. Once money is viewed as a double entry bookkeeping exercise initiated by treasury spending and back by state power, there’s no limit to the amount of money the state can omit. This means there is no limit to how much the treasure can spend. If that’s true there’s no social problem from poverty to infrastructure to education, that cannot be solved with more spending. The country does not get poorer when the treasury borrows and spends, it gets richer, because treasury spending becomes the wealth of the recipients”

In another paragraph in the book, the author states something I thought was pretty interesting:

“In a private conversation with a former member of the Fed board of governors at dinner in Vail Colorado I pointed out that that the Fed was insolvent. She told me bluntly “the central banks don’t need capital” the Fed really does have unlimited capacity to monetize debt, as MMT proponents claim. This implies that the treasury has an unlimited capacity to spend”

(I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly sure what the two previous paragraphs that I quoted mean, all I saw were “There is no limit to what the treasury can spend” and “The treasury has an unlimited capacity to spend” and I thought it was applicable.)

A common rebuttal against the case of UBI is the welfare program. Thomas Sowell made an interesting argument on how welfare ruins families, his theory is that incentives from the government give the father a reason to leave his family or to not take any responsibility to provide for their child. If this is true, could UBI have the same effect? Maybe, but one thing to remember is that the father gets paid as well as the mother, UBI could give fathers a better reason to be a part of their families’ lives, if not they can still contribute through child support because fathers are only allowed to pay child support if they have the funds to do so. In 2022, the U.S. has spent over $1.19 trillion on social welfare programs, adding trillions of more dollars to this may put the government in a position to make tough decisions: Welfare or UBI? Well, Philip Van Parijis and Yannick Vanderborght in their book “Basic Income (2017) argue that social welfare creates problems that can be solved with UBI. One of the main criticisms of welfare benefits is that when a recipient gets a job, the benefits are no longer qualified for these benefits, this creates a trap, in which many recipients refuse to get a job in order to keep those benefits. With Parijis and Vanderborght’s method of UBI, this problem would no longer exist. Basic Income (2017) also believes that UBI will create better working conditions and higher wages, as employers will have to adjust in order to compete with UBI, they believe that this may convince people to not stay at home and do nothing. Andrew Yang would probably disagree with the previous idea from Parijis and Vanderborght, as he would most likely point out that there wouldn’t be a job to begin with, A.I machinery cannot be stopped and we cannot force the creators to halt these experiments, as a matter of fact, the people behind these technology advancements are more pro-UBI than we think:

• I think ultimately we have we will have to have some kind of universal basic income I don’t think we are going to have a choice – Elon Musk

• UBI is worth exploring – Chris Hughes, Marc Andreeson and Sam Altman

• Every generation expands its definition of equality, now it’s time to find a new social contract for our generation. We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income – Mark Zuckerberg

• Jack Dorsey donated $3 million to mayors to experiment with giving a basic income.

The idea has even grown more popular amongst Americans. The Huffington Post reported that 35% of its citizens supported Univeral Basic Income in 2014, however, the support expanded to 48% in 2018 in the Gallop poll. Experiments were tried in different places for UBI, Stockton, Manitoba, Finland, etc. However, the 2020 pandemic really put the experiment of UBI in full swing. As a result of the lockdowns and loss of jobs, the world governments gave out a monthly pay cheque to each citizen who either lost their job or just for being a citizen. In the summer of 2021 (over a year of the Covid pandemic and free money) I was reading an article in The Economist, in which it stated that the nations that gave out the most money on their stimulus cheque had the best economic growth (Can’t find the article, so your just going to have to take my word for it). I am not an economic expert (hence my name), but I think that it makes absolute sense that the countries with the higher stimulus cheques result in economic growth. The more money people have the more money they spend, thus contributing to the economy.

As you can tell from this post, I am a supporter of UBI. Not only because I’m broke and I need the money, but because I also believe UBI could contribute to society more than just paying the bills or staying afloat. 99.6% of human existence was spent as hunter-gatherers, the men would hunt for the majority of the day and the women would gather and take care of the kids. The human race was surviving, but it wasn’t thriving. This changed as soon as agriculture became a common method, all of sudden food was never something to worry about, so now that the most important job (The one that takes the majority of the day) is no longer needed, people became experts in other areas, it gave room for builders, blacksmiths, butchers, artists and so much more. Society evolved when Mathematics was discovered, as Astronomy, and religion, these factors that have shaped our society today were built on the foundation of Agriculture, on the foundation that we do not have to spend all hours of the day looking for something to eat. So, what do we spend the majority of our day doing now? Work. The majority of the world worked 9-5 jobs 5 days a week for 50 years, as a matter of fact, groups of elderly were asked “What is your biggest regret” and the second most common answer was “Working too much” (First was “not doing or saying the things I wanted”), unfortunately most people do not have a choice but to participate in the rat race, just so they can keep their heads above water. The truth is, that work is our hunting and gathering, it is the part that takes the majority of our time. So what would happen in a world where we didn’t need to work? If robots took over the workforce and nobody had to worry about paying any bills, what would be the impact? My theory is that like the hunter-gatherers, people will choose to work on their passion and some could evolve society. Artists would focus on creating Art, Musicians on music, and inventors could now put their time and attention into finding the new new things. History has taught us many things, one of those things is that you don’t need millions of people to advance the world, you only need one. Einstein and Newton’s equations have shaped the world that we have today. Microwaves, cars, engines, spaceships, these contributions to our world could not be without the contributions of just one or two men. That’s because Einstein and Newton dedicated their life to their craft and weren’t distracted by a 9-5 job that they hated or that was below their means, the time that they had to use their gifted minds is what was necessary to their craft. I believe that there are people who are artists but settled for an office job, an inventor who is working construction, a chemistry genius who settled for a teaching job (Walter White), or an entrepreneur who doesn’t have time to follow through on his ambition. These aren’t bad professions, but they aren’t the profession for someone who has the potential to contribute to the world in a big factor. I truly believe that we could live in a utopian world where we could discover 10 Einsteins 8 Stephen King’s, 4 Tesla’s and 5 Beatles (the band) and perhaps UBI could be the driver. One night me and my brother were on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and we concluded that every human is a potential solution, maybe UBI could give us that opportunity.