With each economic crisis that has hit since 2008, we have witnessed the central banks of many developed nations engaging in ever more voluminous quantitative easing. Against this backdrop, we should not have been surprised that supporters of universal basic income (UBI) have been ever more emboldened. Emboldened, that is, to argue that if central banks can freely print money or use sovereign balance sheets to bail out ‘reckless bourgeois capitalism’ then they should do the same to support the fortunes of the proletariat, without whose labour our economies could not work.

After all, how in these enlightened times can one argue against the creation of money to guarantee a level of income to all, without any form of discriminatory means testing? Well, I will do just that. Let us be clear: UBI is a monetary leap well beyond minimum wage. Different too from what is colloquially known as ‘unemployment benefit’. Also far removed from what has become the controversial system of universal credit that currently exists in the UK. UBI would not merely deliver a subsistence payment to all, but the guarantee of ‘comfortable income’.

What UBI would allow, if indeed it were adopted in the way its supporters insist, is quite simply freeing us from work, if we so choose. The freedom, that is, to remove oneself from the urban treadmill – and so bring an end to cities as we have come to know them. Indeed, supporters of UBI argue its arrival would be very much an advance in our ESG standards (environment, social and corporate governance). By freeing us from travelling ‘to work’ UBI would meet the E, and by enriching the hitherto jobless or working poor would meet the S. As for the G, in allowing many to leap off the laborious treadmill, UBI would free them to pursue public and charitable good.

Let me begin my critique by invoking the words of Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century economist: “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavours to live at the expense of everybody else.”

And separately, from the same polymath: “When legislators, after having ruined men by war and taxes, persevere in their idea, they say to themselves ‘if people suffer it is because there is not money enough. We must make some. … We shall make fictitious money, nothing is more easy, and then every citizen will have his pocket-full of it, and they will all be rich.”

For those keen to categorise Bastiat, he was of the monetarist/Austrian school of classical economics. According to this orthodoxy, if the supply of money were to grow more quickly than the availability of real goods, the result could only be price/asset inflation, not merely eroding any short-term benefit of dropping ‘helicopter money’ but ensuring – again quoting from Bastiat – that “the poor man becomes poorer”.  

Advocates of UBI will no doubt point to how the most famous modern monetarist, Milton Friedman, argued: “From the point of view of consumer welfare, money is always just as good and probably better than in-kind transfers.” Rather than being an advocate for UBI, however, Friedman’s promotion of a negative income tax (NIT), through an earned income tax credit, was in fact closer to the universal credit the UK currently employs (sic), albeit of course with staunch critics.

To those who promote UBI, I will end with this challenge. The vast majority of prime-age adults are competitive souls and in this modern age see work not as a yoke they have to carry if they are to survive, but rather as something they carry on doing because they find work fulfilling. Because of this, cities will remain full of contented workers – let us not undermine that by introducing UBI. Rather than the government spending taxpayers’ funds on UBI, it should focus those resources on ensuring the public services in its remit are at their very best to allow the private sector to grow and create ever more fulfilling urban jobs.