@jacek

Universal basic income is socialism, and any government that values freedom should be staunchly opposed to it. That doesn't mean society shouldn't have a safety net. It should. But there's a world of difference between putting a floor under the poorest and handing everyone a government check, and understanding that distinction is critical to getting the AI economy right. In 1800, roughly 83% of the American labor force worked in agriculture. For every person living and working in a city, there were nearly five working the land. Go back further to colonial America and over 90% of the population was tied to farming. Then came the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steel plow, the tractor, synthetic fertilizer, and by 1900 that number dropped to 41%. By 2000, less than 3% of Americans fed the entire nation and much of the world. Millions of people were "displaced," yet the economy didn't collapse. Those people moved to cities and created entirely new industries: manufacturing, retail, finance, entertainment, services that nobody in 1800 could have conceived of. The total number of jobs didn't shrink. It exploded. The pattern of panic followed by prosperity repeats throughout history. When commercial radio launched in the 1920s, musicians feared the end of live performance. Instead, radio created national audiences and launched entire genres. Jazz, blues, and country reached millions who never would have heard them otherwise. The music industry grew. When the vinyl record matured, the same fears surfaced again. More musicians than ever. When television arrived in the 1950s, people predicted the death of radio, cinema, and the theater actor. On the contrary, today we have more actors, more content creators, and more entertainment jobs than at any point in history, especially in the age of streaming. When ATMs appeared in the 1970s, everyone assumed bank tellers were finished, yet teller employment actually increased for decades afterward because cheaper branch operations meant banks opened more branches and tellers shifted to relationship and advisory roles. Is AI the end state of humanity? Highly doubtful. Machinery and chemicals were aids that helped us farm better and relieved people of the physical toils of labor. As we enter an AI age that gives people intellectual advantages they never had, we'll see new jobs, some that have never existed or been imaginable. AI will relieve people of jobs that are no longer needed, but those individuals will find ways to offer value in other ways, just as throughout history we've adapted to changing technology time and time again. AI is yet another tool at our disposal, but it is the human who wields it and creates the next phase of our civilization. AI threatens to kill the programmer? Quite the contrary. We'll have more programmers than ever, working on creative solutions to problems nobody imagined existed. The number of startups will increase dramatically. Think about how many problems remain unsolved simply because the technologists of today never encountered them. Think about the service industry, the trades, the small businesses that still run on pen, paper, and spreadsheets. When a plumber or an electrician or a bakery owner discovers how easy it is to build a website, create a scheduling tool, or automate their invoicing, they'll make their businesses more efficient and invent new ways of making money. These are just obvious examples. The real pool of ideas will be unimaginable. People working in chemistry, biology, and physics will process and analyze data at speeds never before possible, reach conclusions never before reachable, and develop solutions never before conceivable. Things that used to require venture capital funding and ten-person teams will be bootstrappable. Mom and pop shops will emerge for things that once required entire departments to run. Also, I think it's vital to explore the relationship between economic freedom and human prosperity, and in that regard there is no greater authority on the subject than Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman. He was an advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and his ideas shaped the economic policies of the United States and much of the Western world for half a century. He wasn't just an academic theorist. His work directly influenced the policies that pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty around the globe, from the U.S. and the U.K. under Thatcher to the economic liberalization of India and China. In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman made the case that economic freedom is not just nice to have alongside political freedom. It is the prerequisite for it. No society in history has maintained broad political freedom without a foundation of free markets. Socialism traps us in an end state where freedoms are taken away and decisions are made by central planners who spend other people's money on other people, which is the least efficient and least careful way any dollar can be spent. Capitalism lets the individual evolve, use technology in new ways, provide new products and services at scales that weren't previously possible, and remain free. As Friedman put it: "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." The greatest advances in human welfare have not come not from government programs but from the voluntary cooperation of individuals in free markets, each person pursuing their own interest, guided by prices, creating outcomes no central planner could design. That is exactly what will happen with AI. Not because a bureaucrat in Washington decides how to allocate it, but because millions of free people figure out how to use it in ways nobody predicted. We don't try to stop humanity at AI. We free humanity by letting it adjust and letting capitalism work its magic. That also means getting rid of a lot of the bureaucracy we currently have. Friedman spent decades arguing that the real cost of government isn't what it taxes but what it spends, because every dollar the government spends is a dollar taken from the productive private economy. In large part, freeing people means taxes going to zero or very close to it. If you want the effect of universal basic income, why not start by cutting taxes 50%? That would put money in people's hands and also untangle and defund the inefficient government that, in a true capitalist system, should exist in very limited capacity. One thing I am in favor of, and what Friedman proposed, is a negative income tax that would replace the entire welfare bureaucracy with a single mechanism run through the IRS. No food stamps, no housing authorities, no agricultural price supports, no army of caseworkers deciding what poor people are allowed to spend money on. Just cash. If you fall below a certain income threshold, the government tops you up. That's it. The NIT would be deliberately set below a comfortable living, not above it. Traditional welfare creates a poverty trap where earning a dollar means losing a dollar in benefits. You face an effective 100% marginal tax rate for working. The NIT fixes this with a gradual phase-out. Earn more, keep more, always. The floor catches you, but it doesn't become a couch. This is the exact opposite of universal basic income. UBI writes checks to everyone, billionaires included, then claws it back through taxes. It pointlessly churns money through the government's hands. Worse, once every citizen is a recipient, the political pressure to raise the amount becomes unstoppable. There's no natural brake. The NIT's targeting builds one in: only people below the break-even point interact with the system, which keeps it modest and keeps the political distinction between taxpayers and transfer recipients intact. As for "universal high income," a UBI set at $60,000 or $70,000 a year? That's socialism dressed as UBI. The tax rates required to fund it would gut the incentive to work, invest, and produce. You'd sever the connection between effort and reward for a massive portion of the population. Real purchasing power erodes and you're back where you started, but with a government that now controls the primary allocation of income in the economy. The goal should always be finding the minimum intervention that addresses a real problem. A floor, not a ceiling. A patch for a specific market failure, not an attempt to guarantee outcomes. The NIT would actually withdraw the government from housing, food, healthcare, and employment markets where it currently inserts itself through dozens of overlapping programs, each with its own bureaucracy and perverse incentives. It would expand the domain of market allocation, not shrink it. The NIT isn't about wealth redistribution. It's actually a proposition to be less socialistic than the status quo. A strategic retreat from government control, not an advance toward it. The growth of government is akin to socialism, and the current welfare state is a prime example. Replacing it with a simple, targeted, incentive-preserving cash floor while eliminating everything else isn't a step toward socialism. It's a step away from it. The same logic applies to the AI transition. We don't need the government to manage it. We don't need universal basic income to cushion it. We need less government, lower taxes, and the freedom for millions of people to figure out what comes next. That is how every previous technological revolution played out, and there is no reason to believe this one will be any different. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2044990537145753894?s=20

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