April 26, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:38
4069 Finland's Universal Basic Income Experiment Has Failed | True News
Finland’s Universal Basic Income experiment made worldwide headlines in 2017 when it was introduced but has unsurprisingly failed and will be discontinued. The project involved Finland’s government providing roughly $690 every month to 2000 unemployed citizens with no strings attached. Stefan Molyneux explains why such programs are doomed to failure and how welfare by any other name is still immoral income redistribution. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
There are a number of human vices that I think are central to the major challenges of modern society.
They've kind of waxed and waned over time.
But the two biggest ones, I think, at the moment are vanity and greed.
And I will talk about these in reference to something that has just occurred, which is that in Finland, they tried this, what's called a universal basic income, or UBI. Where people just get money from the state.
Well, not from the state, of course, from taxpayers from whom the money is extracted at the point of a gun.
So it's a handout and it doesn't matter whether you're working or not, you get the same amount of money, right?
So one of the problems with welfare is you get paid, I don't know, $20,000 a year in welfare.
But if you make $5,000, then your welfare payments are cut to $15,000, and therefore you're basically being taxed at 100% for probably a pretty crappy job, which is not like something you do for intrinsic joy.
And so being taxed at 100% means that you don't try and get the job and so on.
So people try to bypass this by just saying that we'll just fire money at people, whether they're working or not.
And so this experiment in Finland was going on for about two years and has just been cancelled.
And UBI, sometimes it's a supplement, sometimes it's enough to cover all of your living expenses.
And the people who are for it They say, well, because we don't have to worry about means testing and we don't have to worry about trying to catch people who are trying to scam the system and so on, you just have money going straight to recipients.
And this is what is called more efficient.
Now, that is to me kind of crazy.
They also say the transparency of universal payments reduces the need to detect benefits fraud.
And so again, there's less overhead.
Like the amount of money that actually makes it to the hands of the poor is very little in a welfare state and other income redistribution situations.
But I don't know.
There are cheaters and scammers in society.
And now you could say the same thing about insurance.
Well, don't bother vetting anyone.
Just send the money out to anyone who claims insurance and that's going to lower your overhead because you won't be working to detect fraud.
But that's sort of like saying, well, let's not have any kind of police force or any kind of judicial system because that will lower the overhead in society.
And it's like, well, I guess it will for about five minutes.
And then it won't as property rights go up in smoke.
So it is a weird situation.
And I think that there is a lot of Vanity and there's a lot of greed.
So the greed for the unearned is kind of important and it all arises, I think, in general from the fundamental misapprehension of intelligence, of the bell curve, of creativity, of the distribution of abilities in the general population.
There are people With an IQ of 90 who are going to be stuck in largely menial jobs for the rest of their lives.
I worked with these people. Like, when I was a student, I was a waiter.
I worked at a pretty fancy restaurant, and the guy who was the head waiter was a nice guy, solid guy, not particularly bright, and he knew and accepted and was quite content with the fact that he was going to be a waiter for the rest of his life.
And he didn't have any particular ambitions.
A woman I knew in high school, you know, when I was sort of planning my Trajectory through higher education, she was like, well, college, it's not for me.
You know, she's a nice girl.
Nice girl, but not an abstract thinker, not somebody particularly creative.
And again, salt of the earth, great people, but this sort of bell curve of abilities, I think, is pretty important to understand.
Now, there is, of course, a lot of...
People out there who dangle the bait of excellence in front of people of low ability.
And that is, I think, a pretty cruel thing.
It's kind of like a scam. It's like those, you know, modeling agencies that they discover you and you just have to pay them a couple of thousand dollars.
You'll get some headshots and they'll find you work in the modeling business.
And it's not particularly sorted by looks or anything like that.
And they just, they pray.
They prey on the people who are kind of there.
Who are kind of pretty and kind of handsome.
And it is pretty rough.
Now that, of course, is the greed for the unearned on the part of the people who are dangling this stuff in front of people.
And, of course, it is the greed for the unearned of people who think that if they just pay other people, show up, or maybe have willpower, or maybe work out a little bit more, or maybe, maybe, maybe just discover this one secret trick to investing or something like that, that they can Make all of this money that they're just sort of one trick or one contact or one network away From very, very high achievement, and this does not seem to be the case.
You know, I went to theatre school when I was younger.
I was pretty good at some stuff.
Dance was not my thing.
And there were people I saw, you know, very flexible, you know, the guys who can mash their faces into their knees, and they got great rhythm and great poise and so on.
That was not me.
And... If you think of a sock puppet randomly being hit by lightning, that's my dance style in general.
And I do remember having to do a dance recital.
And, you know, inadvertent comedy.
You could try and claim it as intentional, but it's not a lot of fun.
There was no amount of...
I mean, I've never been particularly flexible.
I had lumbago when I was a kid, so...
I sort of have the bones of a tall person and the hamstrings of a very short person.
So I've never been able to touch my toes and so on.
I'm not going to be a dancer.
This one simple trick will turn you into Baryshnikov or something.
It's not going to happen.
Plus, I generally can't substitute nicotine for protein.
So it's a little tough.
So when you sort of recognize your limitations, that's a very, very good thing.
It allows you to focus on your strengths and discard things which aren't going to work for you.
And it's funny to me because I think this idea that we can just give people money and they'll end up better.
Or there is, of course, this argument that comes a little bit out of the...
It comes a little out of communism, a little out of the RBE stuff, but I repeat myself.
And it is sort of, well, among the proletariat, you see, there are...
There are amazing potentials.
There are sculptors. There are artists.
There are amazing potentials.
And if we give them free money, then they will expand and explore and erupt with all of their human potential.
And in general, if you really, really want something, won't you just work very hard to achieve it and just blast through all the obstacles?
In your way, I mean, that seems to me to be the way to get things done.
And you kind of want a high barrier for things.
I mean, there's lots of people who would like to be a sculptor rather than, say, a waiter.
But you need there to be people who are producing things in order for there to be people who are In a sense, consuming things.
Sculpture is a luxury.
You know, like if you're on a desert island, you want a guy who's really good at growing food or do you want a guy who's really good at sculpting, right?
So you need sort of the foundational productivity in order to have the frou-frou productivity.
And sculpture, again, there's nothing wrong with it.
It's a beautiful art form. It can be very elevating and it can inspire beauty and it's a wonderful thing to have.
But I'm pretty sure that the cave painting came after the food was hunted and killed in the prehistoric era.
I'm pretty sure they didn't stop with the hand painting and then say, hey, I'm pretty hungry.
Can we eat the hand painting? Really can't.
So I think you kind of want a high barrier for the more frou-frou activities in human life because, you know, it's a pretty sweet gig.
It's just that they're in sculpt something rather than, say, operate a lathe or something like that.
So the fact that there are these high barriers, I think that's a good thing.
It's a good thing. The fact that there's a lot of opposition to changing social mores, social norms, which have become very abnormal over the last half century or so.
The fact that there's a high barrier to that, I think it's fair because you want people who've got a lot of strong will, a thick skin, a real dedication to an ideal to be approaching and chipping away at social norms in an attempt to change the way society works.
Society sometimes goes in the right direction.
Sometimes it goes entirely in the wrong direction.
But there's a lot of resistance to course correction in either situation.
So there's a lot of greed for the unearned, and there's a lot of vanity.
And the vanity is not only, you know, I deserve free stuff, and a mental occlusion or eclipse of the source of that free stuff, but the vanity.
You know, the people who are into this kind of coercive income redistribution have always seemed to me to have sort of two characteristics, and this is the vanity and the greed.
And the vanity has a lot to do with, I can wave my magic wand of law, I can point guns at the right people, transfer the right resources, and create a utopia to release people from their inhibitions, their limitations, to release them from mere bourgeois obsessions with bank accounts and pluses and minuses and so on, and liberate their potential and so on.
And the two characteristics that I have found that income redistribution is socialists, leftists, Democrats, and now even Republicans, like almost a quarter of Republicans are keen on the idea of universal basic income.
But to, I think, genuinely hold that viewpoint, two things need to have occurred, or I guess one occurred, one not occurred.
The thing that needs to have occurred...
No, actually, sorry, neither of them occurred.
So the first is that if you've ever...
This is a look deep into your heart, mind and soul moment, my friends.
Have you ever really, really bent your will and tried to help someone?
Try to really help someone.
Someone says they want a particular goal.
Have you bent your will and really, really expended resources, poured heart and soul into trying to get them out of a bad situation, get them into a situation that they want, help them avoid a bad relationship, help get them out of an abusive or destructive relationship.
Have you ever really bent your will?
It could be something as, quote, simple as losing weight or exercising or...
You know, somebody who's always saying, oh, I've always wanted to write and, you know, I'm going to give you some time.
I'm going to help give you resources.
The woman who wrote, you pray love, has written about this.
And I tell you, man, if you have really poured heart and soul into trying to help someone get what he or she wants, you recognize it is a very difficult and challenging and it seems almost always impossible challenge or task to take on.
And I don't know. I mean, let me know in the comments below, have you done this?
Like, really, really tried, strained mightily, to give someone what he or she wants or help someone out of a bad situation that he or she's complaining about.
Now, here I'm talking about where somebody's already admitted there's a problem.
Oh, I'm not getting along with my boyfriend.
He's really mean. Or my girlfriend has cheated on me.
Or my job sucks and I really want to get a different job.
Or I've always wanted to dance.
Now, you can, of course, pave the way with gold to try and get them to where they want to go.
Or you can just encourage them and so on.
But if you've ever really tried to help someone change the course of his or her life, You recognize that it is an enormously difficult thing to do.
I mean, even something, again, as simple as lose weight, right?
Eat less, exercise more, cut out certain food groups, and so on.
Trying to get people to lose weight is insane.
And these are people who... They know they're overweight, they admit that it's a problem, and they commit themselves to losing weight.
And what is it, like 5 or 10 years after people diet, I think only 2 or 3% of them have kept the weight off.
And a lot of them, of course, have regained the weight and more.
Because when you diet, your body goes into starvation mode and applies everything to your hips like stucco.
So even something as simple it takes like people what 15 tries to quit smoking and so on and and it's really it's really tough So even if you yourself might look at your own life You know that there are things that you need to change things you need to improve How easy is it to do those things?
Well, it's really really tough, you know like post 50 I'm like that I'm just making this mental list the other day of like everything I've given up and It's a lot.
It's a lot. I've given up.
I mean, I have a square of dark chocolate once in a while.
I've given up chocolate, candy, cookies, chips, soft drinks, pop, soda, you name it.
Man, the list goes on and on.
Bread, you know, like it's really, oh, aging is just this whole big process, like you're a rocket trying to get into orbit, you know, all of these stages just fall away and all the things that were great that you didn't have to think about twice.
I remember I had a professor when I was in Glendon College at York University.
And I was a broke student, like, you know, ramen and coupons.
And there was a hot dog vendor.
And you could, for like two bucks, you could get a fairly big hot dog.
And then he had these toppings.
Like, you could mount it up with cheese and sauerkraut and onions and olives.
Like, he had a really great spread.
And so you basically could get your meat and your salad, right?
You get a hot dog and you just, you know, mount Vesuvius of toppings.
And that could do you from lunch until...
Late evening sometimes.
And I remember he directed me in some plays.
And we were talking about the play and I was eating this and he just looked at me.
I guess I was, what, 19 or 20?
I think he was 20. And he looked at me and he's like, man, I remember being able to eat like that.
You know, I guess he was younger than I am now.
And I remember looking at him like, well, why wouldn't you just always eat like that?
And I'm like, oh yeah, now I know why you don't have all that, right?
So, if you've really, really tried to help someone, you realize just how enormously difficult it can be.
And I have poured an enormous and ridiculous, in fact.
I mean, it's ridiculous because I should have learned the lesson earlier, but not ridiculous insofar as it gave me a real, a really clear sense of how hard it is to help people.
I'm not particularly bad at helping people.
You know, I could do a lot of that in the show and the call-in shows and so on.
I think people find, when people get emails about how enormously helpful the conversations have been.
So, I know I'm not particularly bad at helping people.
But holy crap, trying to help people is a real quagmire, and if you've really tried, it's, you know, and I have poured money into people, help get where they want, I've lent money to people, I've given money to people, and it's tough.
You know, it's tough.
I mean, I remember...
Someone who was facing homelessness and I wired them a bunch of money and helped prepare them for a job interview.
And, you know, next thing you know, they've played video games all night, didn't show up for their work three days in a row, got fired and might as well have just set fire to that money.
But again, these are lessons learned and it is hard to help people.
Very, very hard to help people.
Now, that doesn't mean helping people is impossible.
It just means it's really, really complicated.
And the more complicated something is, the less you want to use guns to achieve it.
And forced redistribution of wealth, just handing money out to people, is a bad idea.
Charity is really, really tough.
It's very complicated.
You know, it's tougher than surgery, and you wouldn't let some random bureaucrat take out your appendix, would you?
With a spork. I mean, it's really tough.
Because if people are in a bad way, if they've made bad decisions, you want to help them out to the point where they don't end up, you know, homeless, but at the same time, you don't want to give them money for, quote, making bad decisions.
Which is why charity in the past, when it was private, It was, to some degree, financial, but it was much more moral and conversational.
You had to find Jesus.
You had to commit to this.
You had to take these classes.
You had to show up to work. There was all this conditional stuff because charities really, really wanted to help people rather than what they do now, which is fat and bureaucrats.
They use the poor as sort of the...
The grease for the giant machinery of producing state tenure, state salaries, state benefits, and most importantly, state pensions.
And so they are using the poor as a kind of lever of guilt with which to work a gold out of the pockets of the general population.
Well, don't you care about the poor?
Well, that's why I need a $8,000 a month salary and a $10,000 a month benefits package when I retire.
So It's obviously a kind of scam.
I mean, they're not helping the poor, they're just making more of them.
And so the second thing that I think hasn't occurred with people who want this sort of income redistribution is they generally have not been entrepreneurial and really worked hard to create value in the free market or the remnants of the free market.
And so they view money as kind of a natural resource rather than something that people break their backs to generate.
And, you know, I've been an entrepreneur since I was...
Oh, gosh.
Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years now in the software fields and on the wild west of internet conversations and it's really hard.
It's a lot of work.
It's a lot of work. It's a lot of risk and if you haven't gone through that process, starting something from scratch, building it up, Then in general, it's easier to look at money as just something that sticks to rich people.
You know, like there are burrs in the forest, those little hook-on seed things.
And it's like, well, I walked through the woods.
I didn't get any burrs. And you walked through the woods.
I guess you took a slightly different path and you got all these burrs.
Now, if burrs are gold, it's hard to say, well, you earned it.
You just happened to walk through a different path.
So you view money kind of as a natural resource, like air or water.
And then it's easier to say, well, let's just redistribute it.
Because you just happen to have this money.
You just happen to get this money.
And so on. And you can always tell this.
When they talk about redistributing income, like it was just somehow distributed.
Like some blind card dealer just handed out a bunch of cards.
Flying across. And just some happened to the wind and the blindness.
Just some cards happened to accrue more to some people than to others.
And That's not how wealth works.
Wealth is not distributed.
Wealth is created.
It's not like they took all the concentrated wealth of the aristocracy in the 15th century, redistributed it, and magic.
We have the immense wealth of the 21st century.
No, wealth is created. Wealth is created.
When A novel is written.
We don't say, well, this guy just happens to have a novel and this guy doesn't.
Or the creation of novels.
No, that's the wrong way of putting it.
Novels are just somehow redistributed among the population.
Or they're just somehow randomly distributed.
Like, you get to have a novel that's been written and you don't.
Like, height or something like that.
I mean, this is not how reality works.
Novels are created.
And they are created by sacrificing everything else that you could have been doing when you were writing the novel.
And, I mean, the Starbucks controversy recently just sort of reminded me that I used to write in Starbucks.
And, yeah, I would buy my...
I was too poor for lattes, but I remember buying Cafe Americanos, too.
And I would buy, like, at least one an hour.
And I'd take a little obscure table in the back when it wasn't that busy and...
Anyway. So yeah, it's a lot of work.
It's a lot of work. I took, after my entrepreneurial career, after I... The company was sold, resold, and anyway, I ended up not continuing to work at the company that I co-founded.
And I took, I think it was a year and a half off, I took a writing course, and I worked really hard on producing two novels, The God of Atheists and Almost, which I think are great books.
And... That was tough.
It was a lot of research. It was a historical novel.
It was a lot of research, a lot of writing, and all the other things that I could have been doing at that time.
And I remember being offered, this is 16, 17 years ago, $150,000 a year for working three days a week.
Gave all that up to work on writing.
And so, you know, the fact that I can communicate well is not an accident.
Writing is a way of training you for speaking and vice versa.
So when we look at something like novels or songs that are written and so on, they don't just randomly pop up like geisters or gophers.
You work hard to create them.
And without the incentive, they won't be created.
And so this redistribution of income It is taking from people who have created and giving to people who haven't.
I think it does debilitate and enervate and destroy people.
And I have seen people's lives who have been destroyed by welfare.
I have seen people's lives.
They're like caterpillars plowed under in the wet earth of welfare and It doesn't take long for you to lose the muscle of self-discipline, of a regular diurnal cycle, of having a goal, of having a purpose, and then people get depressed, they get lazy, they lose their skills, and they get resentful, and they get fearful.
You can see this fear in the Trump universe these days that people are just terrified.
Like Nicaragua has tried to cut benefits 5% and increase by a relatively small amount what people are paying into.
And there are riots and 25 people are killed by security guards and the entire country might shut down because he's trying to bring the pension payouts or the welfare payouts somewhat in line With mathematical sustainability and people are terrified.
When you become dependent on the state, you have a love-hate relationship with the state.
And that love-hate relationship, to me, shows up very clearly on the left.
It shows up in the Democrats. Quite a bit.
Because, I mean, they say crazy things like, well, the police are sexist and racist and monstrous and enforcers and terrible and blah, blah, blah.
And then they also say, well, only the police should have guns, right?
That's your love-hate relationship.
I mean, it's a bipolar relationship with the state in general.
You can't trust the government, which they say whenever a Republican is in power, but then whenever the Democrats are in power, they want more and more power to accrue to the state.
I mean, it is very, it's a very messy, messy relationship.
So, of course, I mean, this universal basic income, it's been tried in a variety of places.
I know it was tried here in Canada as well.
Of course, it reduces the incentive to work more naturally.
I mean, it's important to remember, you know, a lot of the people who design these programs, they kind of like their work, right?
They enjoy their work.
I mean, look at anybody who's made any kind of money.
If they're still doing some kind of work, it's because they love their work.
And so the people who design these programs, well, they get a lot of power, and they get a lot of virtue signaling, and they get the dopamine of looking good, and of people being dependent on them, and needing them, and being able to hand out gifts that are stolen from other people.
I mean, they love it. So for them, it's a sort of fundamental inability.
Maybe they never grew up poor, maybe they never knew anyone was poor, and maybe they never had the roughneck, low-rent, blue-collar jobs that I had for, you know, I got my first job at 11, and finally got my first Programming job when I was in my 20s, 27, 28, so like 15, 16 years of working pretty crappy jobs.
So the idea that if you win the lottery, you're just going to keep doing those crappy jobs.
And when you have a crappy job in general, you have a crappy boss because the good bosses get promoted to manage more competent and able people and so on.
So the people who design these programs can't imagine that if you won the lottery, so to speak, you wouldn't keep working.
But the reality is that when people who don't have much...
Opportunity or upward mobility or whatever when they get this money, of course they're going to go limp.
They're going to go limp. And that's terrible for them.
Now, a smart person will say, well, I could quit working, but I need to find something else to occupy my time.
Otherwise, I'm going to get depressed or I'm going to get lazy or otherwise I'm going to get resentful and fearful and I'm going to become dependent.
But, you know, we're not talking in general super smart people here.
And this was a randomized group in Finland.
I did a show on Peter Schiff's show quite a while back about Spenumland, which was a welfare system that was set up in England, which destroyed the economy in particular areas for well north of 100 years.
Because what happens is when you start to implement these income redistribution schemes, particularly if they're local, then smart, competent people leave the area.
And less competent, more dependent people swarm into the area.
So you have a population displacement.
Not for the last time. You have a population displacement.
Same thing happened when Spain got all of this gold from the New World.
It created a hyperinflation in Spain.
The able and smart people who had mobile skills left Spain because their savings and their incomes were being eaten away by inflation.
And Spain entered An economic recession slash depression for 400 years.
400 years.
California, are you listening?
I guess you can't, I need to.
So Thomas Paine in 1795 had something called agrarian justice.
It's a universal income.
And Kenya, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, they've all tried this.
So the way it worked in, well, it didn't work in Finland, since January 2017, a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 have been paid 560 euros, 475 pounds.
They don't have to seek or accept employment.
And if you take a job, you continue to receive the same amount.
So here we already have a situation where someone is unemployed.
So this is not a random sample of the population.
And it is really, it's just been a mess.
It's been a failure. And of course, it can't be universally implemented.
And my fundamental test of morality is, can it be universalized?
For more on this, you should check out my book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, available at freedomainradio.com.
You can't universalize it, because some people are going to be receiving, and some people are paying, and some people are going to be paid for facilitating the transfer.
And again, it is coercion.
You're pointing guns at one section of the population, taking their resources by force, and distributing it to other sections of the population.
And that is fundamentally immoral.
It fundamentally won't work.
And again, to me, it always reminds me of people who have not spent heart, blood, and treasure trying to help other people in their life, and or, of course, people who Who have not generated the wealth that they so desperately wish to spread to others.
