Link Turn is wrong---doesn’t help entrepreneurship---removing financial risk is bad.

Unfortunately, UBI proponents fail to realize that removing risk, though beneficial to a small number of entrepreneurs, would encourage a deluge of low-quality ventures, distorting markets and leaving the majority worse off.

Since UBI would mostly cover labour costs, it is fair to assume that, with respect to improving entrepreneurial accessibility, its benefits would be concentrated in service-based industries with low capital costs. An income subsidy can free up your time, but it can’t lease you an industrial kitchen or buy you much inventory. It would also mostly foster micro-businesses. Larger teams would be difficult to sustain because doing so would require everyone to agree to subsisting on poverty-level incomes for an undetermined length of time. The larger the team, the less sense of ownership each member has of the overall project, reducing its attractiveness relative to a more traditional, better-paying job.

Considering these constraints, you can further break ventures down into two camps. In the first are those that are just another iteration of an already-proven business model. Here you’ll mostly find self-employed freelancers, and smaller businesses — think web designers, digital marketers, fitness coaches, copywriters, and so on. In the second camp, you have the innovators — tech entrepreneurs and similar dreamers. In either camp, removing financial risk is a bad thing.

For freelancers, the typical route to success is to build your business on the side, however long that takes, until it warrants quitting your day job. UBI, as an income subsidy, would encourage people to prematurely quit their day jobs to try their hand at full-time freelancing despite not yet building enough work to warrant doing so. Risk is a natural way of attenuating the supply of labour to market demand — the more oversupplied a market, the riskier it is to enter it. By removing that restraint, UBI would artificially balloon the supply of freelance labour in the name of fostering entrepreneurship.

This would encourage freelancers to discount their prices to compete for limited demand — not just the new “entrepreneurs” entering the market, but also the established freelancers who’d have to compete against them, directly or indirectly. Undoubtedly a few people would benefit from UBI through expediting their business growth, but only at the cost of [destroying]crippling the freelancer market with chronic supply problems. It’s hard enough to thrive in the market without having to compete against an army of zombie businesses kept alive by UBI.

What about innovative businesses, the tech founders and dreamers? Risk is important there, too. It is incredibly difficult to create something new and genuinely useful. Over 90 per cent of startups fail, after all. The job of the entrepreneur is to gamble on that slim chance of success, to nurture it through immense self-sacrifice and unrelenting self-criticism. It’s masochistic but the pay-off, when it happens, is dizzying.

What UBI does, at least in this case, is indiscriminately cover the costs of gamblers. Society pays his bills, and, in the off chance that he wins, his riches are his alone, private bounty he gets to enjoy at everyone else’s expense. Worse than that, buoyed by subsidies, he has less reason to place thoughtful bets. Venture capitalists know this — that it’s better to invest in a gambler who needs to win to eat, rather than someone playing for fun.