There are a little over 150 million employed people in the United States: about 3.4 million drive trucks, taxis, buses or delivery vehicles, meaning that more than one in every 50 workers in the U.S. operates a motor vehicle.
Within ten years, many will be out of a job, for self-driving vehicles will become cheaper than paying humans. This inevitable displacement of human workers means a radical change is necessary.
Given that capitalism is unlikely to go away anytime soon, I propose a humane and efficient way to address this problem: a universal basic income (UBI).
The idea of a UBI is simple. While the details vary from proposal to proposal, the fundamental policy would be that everyone, regardless of employment or occupation, would receive a fixed regular income — enough to cover all basic necessities.
Some of the most prominent political thinkers, such as Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, proposed forms of basic income, and even the Nobel Prize-winning, libertarian capitalist economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are among the concept’s most prominent advocates.
How would such a program be funded? One way would be a land value tax, in which land owners pay a percentage of the unimproved value of the land that they own.
The land value tax has been advocated for by many economists, including Adam Smith. The cost would also be offset somewhat by the elimination of programs that would then be redundant, such as most forms of welfare and tax credits.
The most common argument against giving people an income to cover their basic needs is that they will stop working.
However, in the ‘60s, universal basic income experiments all over the U.S. found that it made a negligible difference in the numbers of hours worked — and those who chose to work less were either students who spent more time on their education, or mothers who spent more time raising young children.
