Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The general idea behind the theory of Universal Basic Income (UBI), which I’ve written about in two previous blogs — http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2017/06/universal-basic-incomeintroduction-to.html and http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2017/07/milton-friedman-conservative-voice-for.html — is that it should be unconditional. For this reason, some economists and political philosophers translate the UBI acronym as Unconditional Basic Income. The majority of proponents of the idea agree on this single point. The most socially sound reason for this is that UBI is a way of ensuring a universal alternative to abject poverty. But the best economic argument in favor of UBI is a very practical one: By providing all citizens, no matter what their economic or social conditions might be, with a basic form of subsistence, the enormous bureaucracy currently involved in vetting the beneficiaries of social welfare programs would be vastly reduced, as would the budg...

Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, who died in 2006 at the age of 94, was for decades considered, a leading US economist, who garnered worldwide renown. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his many achievements, Friedman criticized traditional Keynesian economics as “naïve” and reinterpreted many of the economic theories broadly accepted up to his era. He was an outspoken free market capitalist who acted as an honored adviser to emblematically ultra-conservative world leaders such as US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and his theories on such key areas as monetary policy, privatization and deregulation exercised a major influence on the governing policies of many Western governments and multilateral organizations in the 1980s and ‘90s. Such a staunch conservative would seem like an unlikely academic to go to in search of backing for the controversial idea of giving spending money away to every person and family, no strin...