Who Promotes Universal Basic Income — and Why Does It Matter?
An old idea with new sponsors — and a question that will not go away
There is a question I rarely ask aloud, but which returns to me with stubborn persistence every time I read about artificial intelligence and the labour market: if tomorrow half of what people do at their desks can be taken over by an algorithm, what remains of the social contract we all understood — that work gives purpose, that purpose gives dignity, that dignity gives citizenship? I do not know the answer. What I do know is that there exists a proposal which has circulated for several centuries and which, in recent years, has acquired some surprising sponsors: the Universal Basic Income — or, in its now-ubiquitous acronym, UBI.
This is the story of that idea: who promotes it today, which experiments have tested it, which questions it fails to resolve — and a conceptual rival that frames the problem entirely differently. Not money for everyone, but things for everyone.
An Idea with Deep Roots
Before we discuss Sam Altman or Elon Musk, we need to go further back. The notion of an unconditional income for every member of a community is not an invention of Silicon Valley. It is a political proposal with a biography spanning several centuries.
Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual architects of American independence, proposed in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice an annual payment to every citizen upon reaching the age of twenty-one, financed through a tax on landed property. Not as charity, but as compensation: the land, Paine argued, had once belonged to everyone, and private property was, in essence, a collective dispossession. Compensation was the debt society owed to those dispossessed.
Several generations later, Milton Friedman — hardly a socialist — proposed the negative income tax: a mechanism by which the state would no longer distribute conditional benefits but would automatically top up the incomes of those falling below a minimum threshold. The logic was administrative efficiency: eliminate bureaucracy and the behavioural traps embedded in the existing welfare architecture. Friedrich Hayek himself noted, in the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, that "the assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society." Hayek, the intellectual patron of economic liberalism.
In 1986, a group of European academics — with Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs at the centre — founded at Louvain the BIEN network (Basic Income European Network, later renamed the Basic Income Earth Network). Van Parijs would become the éminence grise of the academic UBI movement, articulating the argument in terms of real freedom: freedom does not mean merely the absence of constraint. It means the presence of resources without which choice remains a fiction. A poor person is, in a philosophical sense, less free — not because anyone prevents them, but because they lack the means to choose.
Author's note: There is a paradox that haunts me, as a citizen from northern Moldova, one of the poorer regions of Romania: the liberals who most despise the state are invariably the first to demand UBI when they fear social unrest. And the socialists who most love the state are the first to oppose UBI when they realise it might replace their systems of conditional control. An idea in which everyone recognises something of themselves — and no one recognises themselves fully.