People often talk about the rise of machines and the mass automation movement as some far off distant thing, but the reality is that in a few decades, the amount of jobs replaced by machines will leave our economy unable to function. In the past when you created a new industry it would often mean that you needed a higher amount of people for the new jobs that were created, but this is no longer the case. The jobs that are being created today are primarily programming jobs and far fewer are needed than before. If our population continues to grow there will literally no longer be any jobs for children of the next generation.
Having an unemployment rate higher than 25% is not an option as we have seen in many countries post war or most recently Greece after their collapse. There will literally be rioting in the streets and people who cant feed their families. So what should we do in order to make sure this doesn’t happen, because not having riots in the street is good for your country as a whole. So it seems like we will either have two options, the first of which is have the government make it mandatory to have a worker tied to a robot ( probably not going to happen in the long run) or to create some sort of universal basic income system in order to take care of everyone.
The problem with a universal basic income is not only selling an entire country on the idea, especially a country like the United States, but also figuring out the economics of such a system. We would literally be throwing away hundreds of years of economic theory for a system that is untested and untried, unless we were to roll out small test beds for the system, like some countries in Europe have. In addition you would have to sell an entire country on the idea and with countries like the United States, where many people have big problems with handouts, it would probably be a very hard topic to sell. In the long run I would probably expect the federal government to take a step back to see states be the ones who make the decisions.
Another huge problem with a basic universal income is where do you actually get the money to distribute to the public? One easy way is to tax the companies that are producing the goods in the territory of the people living there, but that might just force companies to move elsewhere. You could also put heavy sales tax on items , but that will just cause the price of the goods to go up and have the buyer eat the burden. Hopefully in the future what will end up happening is there are so many competitors and the cost to make the goods is so cheap that it will force goods to a point where anyone could afford them.
Perhaps one of the most overlooked problems a universal income might cause is that it gives human beings no purpose in life. Many people relate to their job as their purpose and those who don’t have one become lost. I could imagine a world where people just get high and do nothing all day because they simply don’t need to. Is this really living? There are many more important questions that would need to be addressed before such a drastic economic policy would be adopted, but I do think that at some point we will need to seriously look at adopting a basic universal income. What are your opinions?