Caleb Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 20, 2016. I am Caleb Brown. The Universal Basic Income, an idea to replace federal welfare programs, is decidedly controversial. Charles Murray argues that such a program can be justified as a less problematic alternative to the Byzantine system of welfare programs in the U.S. today. He spoke at the Cato Institute earlier this month.

Charles Murray: The libertarian case for this can be made on just purely the grounds of the lesser of the evils. That’s the ground that Milton Friedman used for his negative income tax proposal. I would put this, this part of the case is saying look, there is no way that an advanced democracy of the West is going to get rid of massive amounts of transfer payments. It’s just not going to happen. A libertarian dream of dismantling the welfare state is not in the cards, let’s strike a grand bargain with the Left. And the grand bargain is that we will let you spend an awful lot of money on transfer payments to help the disadvantaged and your part is that you give up the role of the state in trying to stage manage people’s lives. That’s why the book is called In Our Hands. In fact, there are a couple of other things that are really paramount in what I am trying to get at in this plan. As I was saying to Andy before we came up here, there’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that the plan I propose is going to get enacted the way I want it to be enacted. So why am I describing it? Because there are a couple of things I think it accomplishes that are hugely important. One of them has to do with what I am increasingly convinced is the reality that faces us within a matter of decades, maybe not that many decades, maybe only ten or fifteen years, in which the numbers of jobs that disappear is so great that we have to start thinking in terms of an economy in which people can live satisfying lives with a combination of paid work, but not necessarily 40 hours a week in the old-fashioned sense of that word. The response that I get, especially from libertarians, is you guys have been saying this since the Luddites, that every technological advance is going to get rid of jobs and every time you’ve been wrong, more jobs have been created, and to argue this time it’s different is a fool’s game. This time it’s different. And I think that Andy and I agree on this. It’s not just that we are going to have driverless cars, probably in about ten years. And it’s not just that this all by itself is what, four million jobs? Huge number of jobs that disappear. Good-paying jobs that disappear. We are going to be carving out millions of white collar jobs because artificial intelligence, after years of being overhyped, has finally come of age and it is now able to do all sorts of things that formally were done by people usually with college educations, pretty smart people who had to make decisions that a computer couldn’t make, and now the computer can do that. We can talk about those more specifically but I think that unless we look ahead to that we are going to be going down the wrong road. Jobs programs, retraining, all of these things that are provided by the typical you know, solutions to our workforce problem just aren’t going to work for reasons that are historically unprecedented. The second thing, and probably the main reason that I think enacting this would be not just necessary because of a variety of contingencies that are forcing themselves upon us, but a good thing in terms of the way the country functions is I think it has a chance of revitalizing American civil society. First, think of those people who have serious problems. So you have somebody who is on the basic Universal Income and gets his check every month, but he drinks it up. So, it’s ten days to go to the end of the month, he is out of money. Well, he can’t go to the government for help. He has to go to his girlfriend, his parents, his children, his neighbors, the Salvation Army. He has to go somewhere and ask for help. There is, however, a major difference in the way that that person will interact with the people he asked for help. He is no longer a helpless victim who can’t do anything, and that’s what he’s going to be told. Yeah, we aren’t going to let you starve in the streets, but it’s time for you to get your act together. Because we know you’ve got a check coming in to just ten days and let’s start to take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again. One such interaction doesn’t make much difference necessarily. Imagine a country in which millions of such interactions are taking place constantly. That’s one aspect. Let me just say quickly dealing with human needs is really tough, whether we are trying to do it through social service agencies now or whether we were trying to do it philanthropically now, it’s very tough. And my proposition is the only consistently effective way, and even then it’s tough, is by people who are very close to the person in need. And right now we have shipped these responsibilities downtown in ways which undercut one of the great strengths of America’s traditional society. The other thing that will happen, however, in revitalizing America’s traditional society is historically, as observes from Tocqueville on down have said over and over, America has been extraordinary in the degree to which it responds to problems by creating associations through private, non-governmental means. When the government got deeply involved in social welfare the associations continued, the philanthropy continued, but it was diverted to other kinds of arenas in which the government was not so active. Well, I think that the best thing we can do is to get that kind of energy back into the civil society traditionally defined. And I think that it is also a way you know, people talk about infrastructure and why aren’t we building more infrastructure when obviously libertarians and liberals alike can agree you do need bridges that don’t fall down. Well there’s a parallel in civil society and that is there are all sorts of needs that need to be tended to that don’t necessarily qualify for paid work. The Murray family has a classic example of that. My wife who well, she’s a Yale Ph.D. She could get a job, you know, if she wanted to. She is really busy and she doesn’t get paid a cent for any of the things she does, but her day is busy all day long with half a dozen different useful organizations in which she is contributing her time and also her quite considerable talent. Well, multiply that by some millions of people who maybe now are in paid jobs but they’re not going to be sitting around the house watching TV and playing videogames in the presence of a Universal Basic Income. They are going to be busy just as they are now, but we’re making it a lot easier for them to make that choice because of the Universal Basic Income that is in effect subsidizing that kind of work.

Caleb Brown: Charles Murray is author of many books, such as Losing Ground. He is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Subscribe to this podcast at iTunes, Google Play, and with Cato’s iOS app. And follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.