UBI fails – accelerates class divisions and collapse.

It’s striking to note that even many of the most wealthy businesspeople in the world, like Elon Musk and Richard Branson, have recognized that a radical change in the economy will be necessary in order to adapt to the next wave of automation. The most popular policy prescription is a universal basic income, a government program which would provide a livable income to every citizen regardless of employment or financial means. Most of these pro-UBI billionaires hope that this policy would allow markets and private ownership of capital to continue indefinitely— effectively a bandaid solution to adapt capitalism to an increasingly jobless world.

But there are good reasons to believe that capitalism and a UBI can’t coexist for long. Such an arrangement would likely lead to a great amount of civil unrest and social instability. Class divisions would be made much more obvious and grotesque in such a scenario, and the unemployable majority would look at their trillionaire overlords with envy and disgust. It would quickly become clear to everyone that the owners of capital are not providing anything of use to society, and are simply extracting rents at the expense of the general population.

The capitalists, on the other hand, wouldn’t approve of being taxed at high rates in order to give handouts to the unemployable. They would prefer a situation in which the wealthy could simply trade amongst themselves. Even today, most of the tech entrepreneurs who are speaking out in favor of a UBI don’t want to fund it by raising taxes on themselves— they’re advocating to replace the entire existing social safety net with a meager cash payment.