Part of our core mission? Exposing the Left's blatant hypocrisy. Help us continue the fight and support the 2024 Year-End Campaign now.

July 6, 2017

How the Universal Basic Income Stifles Human Flourishing

Billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks UBI is a fantastic idea. Here’s why he’s wrong.

Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the commencement address at Harvard University, where he advocated the Universal Basic Income (UBI), a concept in which the government gives every adult a check — not for working, but for merely existing. Following his trip to Alaska this week, Zuckerberg announced that the UBI is a “bipartisan idea” worth exploring. But is it?

Zuckerberg is a Harvard drop-out billionaire who made his money from a technology concept that leverages the basic human need to be heard by others. It thrives upon social pressure and the desire to prove oneself and one’s worthiness to the world.

He attributes his success to “luck” and wants others to have access to capital via the UBI as a “cushion to try new ideas” so that they might achieve their dreams. Yet rather than starting an entrepreneurship training organization, or contributing his own billions to a UBI fund, Zuckerberg tasks this job to the government. “People like me should pay for it,” he did say, but through taxes that he can pay accountants to avoid.

Zuckerberg essentially wants a pension system, without one basic requirement: a pension fund. He fails to acknowledge a core problem — that the government has no money. The only way the government makes money is to tax those who work hard.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Charles Murray, a conservative, also advocates the UBI — as a replacement for current subsidy programs like Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, welfare programs and the agencies that manage them. Murray believes that the UBI will get rid of bureaucracy, but the real way to get rid of bureaucracy is to just get rid of it, not to create a new, different agency.

Murray advocates that an annual stipend would begin at age 21 with $13,000, $3,000 of which would be required for health care. $10,000 could then be spent freely. The stipend begins to lower once the recipient earns $30,000 or more per year. The lowest yearly stipend would be $6,500 per year for those who make $60,000 per year. In addition to being extremely expensive, the plan rewards the lazy and penalizes the hard-working. It subsidizes vice, rather than promoting human flourishing through hard work.

Murray also supports the UBI because he fears that people will lose their jobs to technological innovation, and that the great technological shifts will make many Americans jobless. However, historically people shift as technology shifts. Take, for example, the whaling industry. In the 19th century, most of the world burned whale blubber for fuel — for lamps, lights and lighthouses. With the invention of electricity, no one needed whale blubber anymore, and consequently, no one needed whalers or lighthouse keepers. The whalers and the lighthouse keepers had obsolete jobs, but did that mean they needed a check from the government? No, the people in those jobs found new jobs and history moved on.

This concept also assumes that people freed from the slavery of work will simply act in love and charity, or as Fortune’s Kevin O’ Marah says, have “the freedom to realize our personal best.” The key flaw in this thinking is that work somehow stifles our personal best, while leisure allows us to achieve it. However, if work presented a barrier to altruism and realizing one’s “personal best,” then public housing communities would be places of love, safety and entrepreneurial ventures. Instead, they are cesspools of violence, disintegrated families and crime.

Zuckerberg decries income inequality as wrong and suggests a “new social contract” including a UBI as a solution. Taken to its logical conclusion, however, the “solution” to income inequality involves everyone having the exact same life. There is, in fact, an existing system in which people are all given the same clothes to wear, fed the same food, and given the same life. It’s extremely fair. It’s called prison.

The Founders of this country pledged their “lives and fortunes” not for the prison of lifestyle “equality” but rather for the opportunity to work diligently and to achieve their dreams through ingenuity and hard work. Holding fast to the concept of America as the place of opportunity, rather than the land of subsidies, reacquaints us with the core values that make this country and her people truly flourish.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.