Why I support a guaranteed basic income

I've been a radical social liberal for a long time, but agnostic about most economic issues.  Macroeconomics is black magic, after all.  Nonetheless, over the past few years my economic politics have skewed more and more liberal, even though I don't blog about it much.

For example, one hypothetical policy I would support is a policy of giving everyone money.

That's a policy that I never would have supported when I was younger.  Even when I was a teenager, I understood that money is a fictitious entity.  If everyone had more money things would just cost more.

Put another way, say we had enough bread and houses to provide food and shelter for a million people.  If you gave everyone money, then prices would just rise until only a million people can afford bread and houses.  The same number of people would starve and go homeless, because it's not really a money issue, it's an issue of how much resources we have.

On the other hand, if you give everyone the same amount of money, that has the effect of redistributing wealth.  It would reduce inequality, basically.  And there really would be fewer starving and homeless people, because we would invest less in producing luxury goods for the most wealthy, and invest more in producing additional bread and houses for the poor.

One thing that colors my view is that I'm part of the millenial generation.  I'm entering the workforce in a time when unemployment is higher than ever.  What do unemployment rates say about our society?  It's possible that it means we're just allocating resources poorly.  But the other interpretation is that we have a surplus of labor.  We're too efficient at producing the goods that we need.  This is a bad thing only because employment is the primary way we distribute money.  If individuals can't find jobs then they're in financial trouble.  The easy solution is to distribute money by other means.

I think the unemployment levels are really just the tip of the iceberg.  When people are desperate for jobs, they'll accept worse jobs.  I'm coming from a cynical grad student perspective, and one of the things I despise is the workaholic culture in academia.  People expect you to work longer than normal hours.  And in order to advance to professorship, most people have to spend years in postdocs for low pay.  You just have to put up with it, because there are too many other people who want your job.

There are also governmental jobs which provide no real value to society.  They're just there because governmental employees can vote, and therefore vote to maintain their own jobs.  I would rather just give those people money instead of having them waste their time to get it.

Why a guaranteed basic income?  Why not welfare instead?  There are two reasons, one economic, and the other social.

Earlier, I learned a bit about how welfare works in the US.  People are awarded a certain amount of money, with a certain percentage of their income deducted.  And in order to remain eligible for welfare, people need to eventually find a job.  But if we have a surplus of labor, why require people to find a job?  And deducting a percentage of people's income amounts to an effective tax on the poorest people.  By giving everyone the same amount of money regardless of income, we remove that effective tax (not to mention cut down on bureaucratic costs).

Welfare also has a social problem, since they're perceived as handouts rather than money that is rightly owned by its beneficiaries.  Taking welfare amounts to admitting that you are unable to provide for yourself.  But this isn't really a matter of individual failure, it's a matter of correcting an economic problem that comes from labor surplus.  Thus, nobody should feel bad about receiving money.  If wealthy people receive the same amount of money, it would be harder to stigmatize.

Anyway, I have the impression that this puts me way to the left of US democrats.  Although to be fair, libertarians often support a similar policy under the heading "negative income tax".