Perhaps you’ve heard the call for a ‘universal income’ to prevent poverty and bring a little more to the proverbial goal of equality. Well, it turns out many countries are considering this and a few already have such a thing. Most of us in capitalist countries hesitate at the thought of such a concept, as it is a disincentive for those at the bottom to climb up and out of poverty. Still, you’d be surprised how much traction this idea is getting in even first world nations, even though the scheme has ‘socialism’ and big government written all over it.

There was an interesting article on the Mashable Website titled; “eBay founder backs tests to give people free money,” by Patrick Kulp on February 9, 2017 which stated:

“The idea of a universal basic income has found growing support in Silicon Valley as robots threaten to radically change the nature of work. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is the latest tech bigwig to get behind the concept. His philanthropic investment firm announced it will give nearly 1/2 million $$ for test group in Kenya. The thinking is that such a program would relieve economic stress as automation technology severely reduces the demand for labor.”

Okay, but a limited Universal Income project will not cause substantial inflation whereas if a whole country does it, it could be a disaster. How inflation works is not an unknown quantity, or obscure theory, it is just Economics 101. There was an interesting podcast from CATO Institute on why this won’t work and why folks are pushing for it. Well, I thought we defeated socialism in the United States recently with the election of Donald Trump, apparently not, or apparently many so-called intellectual elites didn’t get the message.

Interestingly enough this has also been a topic in the EU as of late – even mention of it at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2016. It seems we have a global socialist agenda, even though we’ve seen complete chaos in nations that take a strong economic socialist stance, nations such as the PIIGS of the EU (PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, and others. It’s not that it isn’t a nice thing to do to help your fellow man, or have a safety net to protect the poor, it is just that socialism doesn’t work.

Here in the US we’ve watched Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in the last election promote a widening of gifts from the government in trade for votes and furthering the Nanny State motif, that too is a dead-end, just as the concept of universal income is, especially in a place of high productivity and foundational claims of free-enterprise and self-reliance. Please consider all this and think on it.