“Bad News for Universal Basic Income.” The “bad news,” per  Reason‘s Eric Boehm. is that a non-profit’s three-year, 1,000-person, $1,000-per-month trial of the idea “resulted in decreased productivity and earnings, and more leisure time.”

Is that really bad news? Well, it depends on who you are and what you want.

UBI advocates  like Andrew Yang  predict the idea would, in part, “enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses … relocate for work.”

Bad news indeed … on those metrics, anyway.

But Yang also predicts a UBI would let recipients “be more creative, stay healthy … spend time with their children, take care of loved ones …”

Call it a tie at most.

The education/productivity/work side of Yang’s equation seems like so much window dressing to soothe real economic concerns.

The real marketing sizzle lies in a utopian vision aimed at people who would — quite understandably — rather spend eight hours a day in front of the television set than on the service side of a fast food drive-thru window, and be willing to take a bit of a pay cut (probably offset by reduced costs of transportation, etc.) for it.

I’m opposed to “guaranteed income” schemes for a number of reasons, but those reasons don’t really include the economic side.

I suspect we may be on our way toward the possibility of something like Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — an economy in which AI-powered robots become quite capable of handling most, if not all, aspects of economic production, leaving us (at least in theory) with no more strenuous work to do than picking drone-delivered pizza up from the porch and remembering to put the boxes out for robot sanitation workers to whisk away.

In that scenario, a Universal Basic Income would simply serve as a rationing mechanism. Scarcity would still exist. Letting everyone order a new Ferrari each week (after crashing the old one for fun) could bring the system down pretty quickly. You’d have to decide between three pizzas or one ribeye dinner, etc., so as not to strain our robot servants’ productive capacity.

I’m not an economist, and I apologize for playing one on the Internet, but I hope you see my point: Inspiring economic activity may not be a necessary feature of a UBI.

The trial results are GREAT news for Fully Automated Luxury Communism types … and for authoritarians who prefer fewer limits to their power over other people.

A UBI wouldn’t really be “universal.” Some groups (prison inmates, for example) would find themselves excluded from the start, with political dissidents, sooner or later, following them into the “no money for you” abyss. The latter would be too busy working (if there were any jobs to be had) or starving to inconvenience our “benevolent” rulers. That threat would leave them with an entirely free hand (holding a robot-manufactured whip).

Would I love to receive a “subsistence wage,” gratis, no questions asked? Who wouldn’t? But the devils in the details sound more like hell than like utopia.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“You should get a one-year jail sentence if you do anything to desecrate the American flag,” former (and possibly future) president Donald Trump told the hosts of Fox & Friends on July 25.

In a rare moment of at least partial agreement with Trump, likely Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris says “I condemn the burning of the American flag. That flag is a symbol of our highest ideals as a nation and represents the promise of America. It should never be desecrated in that way.”

Both were referring to pro-Palestinian protesters who stole flags from in front of Washington, DC’s Union Station before burning them.

I condemn that too, by the way — not because flags were burned, but because those flags apparently didn’t belong to the people who burned them.

The standard defense of flag-burning, affirmed by the US Supreme Court, treats flag-burning as  “speech” that enjoys the protection the First Amendment.

Well, OK, I get that. Whether it’s technically “speech” or not it’s at least expressive conduct, and I’m all for freedom of non-violent expressive conduct.

But to me, what it’s really about is property rights.

If you own a piece of cloth — even a piece of cloth with a particular pattern on it that makes it into what my friend and fellow political writer Kent McManigal calls a “Holy Pole Quilt,” possessing quasi-religious-relic qualities to certain cultists — it’s yours.

Not Donald Trump’s.

Not Kamala Harris’s.

Yours.

You don’t get to ride in their limousines; they don’t get to tell you what to do with your flag.

The exceptions to that rule are simple, and should be obvious:

You don’t get to strangle someone with your flag.

If you want to burn it, you have to do so in a way that doesn’t endanger the lives or property of others.

Apart from exceptions of that type, what you do with it is your business and no one else’s.

If you want to “desecrate” it in some way — burn it, draw a thin blue line across it, cut it up to make yourself a g-string — have at.

Personally, I use two flags (one “American” and one representing my favorite college football team) as window curtains. Want them? Molon labe!

If you steal someone else’s flag, that’s a crime and you’re a thief … just as it would be a crime and you would be a thief if you stole a candy bar, a coffee cup, or a Corolla. The penalty (return or restitution, and perhaps punitive damages) should be the same for all four crimes.

I’d rather burn every flag in the country than watch Trump and Harris wrap themselves in those flags to score cheap political points with low-IQ, short attention span voters.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Following Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from a seemingly doomed re-election campaign, Democrats instantly re-focused on picking/backing a new candidate (at the moment, vice-president Kamala Harris seems well on her way to nailing the nomination down), while Republicans took up the cry “if he’s unable to run, he’s unable to serve, and should resign or be removed.”

I’m not seeing much speculation — yet — from either camp on the equally interesting subject of  what Joe Biden’s final six months in office might look like.

There’s an old, apparently incorrect but highly applicable, western saying that the Chinese word for “crisis” embodies the written characters representing “danger” and “opportunity.”

The “danger” part of the Biden equation is easy to see: To the extent that his Democratic successor gets blamed for his mistakes, anything he does could potentially damage that successor’s prospects in November.

But what if Biden doesn’t believe Harris (or some other prospective nominee) can win the election anyway? What if he believes he’s a true “lame duck?”

If that’s the case, he doesn’t need to give a [word that rhymes with “duck”], does he? He can do as he pleases without facing much in the way of consequences.

The overbearing 21st century power of the imperial presidency, combined with extreme unlikelihood that a Democratic cabinet would invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him, or a a split Senate convict him upon impeachment, leaves him sitting pretty to do things he couldn’t do if he was worried about his re-election (or his chosen successor’s election).

On the trivial end, he could, for example, pardon his son Hunter, recently convicted on (wholly unconstitutional) federal gun charges. Heck, he could probably sell pardons and other executive branch favors to the highest bidders without worrying much about how that looked.

He could also do more consequential things.

For example, in his meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week, he could put his foot down: No immediate and unconditional Gaza ceasefire, no more US weapons (and the usual welfare checks might get lost in the mail, too).

He could pick up the phone and tell Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy something similar: Open real peace talks with Moscow or the weapons shipments stop.

He could re-commit the US, fully and unconditionally, to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the “Iran Nuclear Deal.”

He could end the US embargo on Cuba and fully normalize diplomatic relations with its regime.

Of course, he could go in the opposite direction, dragging the US into all-out wars with any or all of several adversaries. But based on his decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan instead of nullifying his predecessor’s deal  with the Taliban, I suspect there may be a “peace president” trapped in the body of America’s current “war president.”

In fact, the Afghanistan withdrawal had me thinking, at the time, that he INTENDED to be a one-term president with a “peacemaker” legacy.

Now he has multiple opportunities to be exactly that … if that’s what he wants.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY