Bottom line: don't even mention the word "government" when looking for solutions to what are basically cultural problems

Steven Greenhut has a piece at The American Spectator about a plan afoot in Stockton, California - the city that famously went bankrupt a while back - to solve its myriad social and economic ills with a universal basic income.

It's a most unappealing municipality at present:

KQED News pinpoints some of Stockton’s enduring problems: “Wage stagnation. Rising housing prices. Loss of middle-class jobs. The looming threat of automation.” We can add some others: A dreadful violent-crime problem, trash-strewn streets, a vacant downtown that could be a movie set for a third installment of Blade Runner, crumbling public services, overpaid public employees, high taxes, and a troubled city budget.

The article is good. It covers nearly all the right bases: how the universal-basic-income "solution" would disincentivize the search for any kind of work, diminish human dignity and, as a practical matter, not provide enough to actually live on to recipients.

I'm pleased to see that he acknowledges that over the years even conservative wonks such as Milton Friedman have considered whether there were any possible merits to the idea. He could have included James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute as well. 

Our society needs intellectuals - that is, intellectuals who put clarity front and center among their standards and are driven by free-market principles - but there is a temptation to which many of them succumb as they occasionally emerge from the reams of data in which they bury themselves. They tend to think it's clever to kick around kinky ideas that run counter to their basic premises. Such is the case here.

Pethokoukis, like Friedman before him, does adamantly insist that a UBI would only work if it replaced every other kind of transfer payment: Social Security, Medicare, housing subsidies, SNAP certificates, etc.

I don't care if you came up with the most airtight way of achieving this, it would still be kinky.

What I mean is, that it's a scheme that still involves government.

Bad and wrong from the get-go. As I said in a post the other day about climate-"science" tyranny, the faultiness of these kinky ideas stems from looking at these things on a macro level. It leads policy wonks to start asking, "What are we going to do about these people?"

Wrong way to come out of the gate. Let's not be a "we" about this, and let's not concoct some kind of group called "these people." There are individual human beings, with talents, aspirations, dignity, lack thereof, foibles and maybe even pathologies. They are each free, or we must presume so, to chart their own destinies. To come up with some macro "solution" to what is essentially their business is to rob them of the most basic kind of dignity we each and all ought to be accorded.

How does this apply to the Stockton situation?

If I lived there, I'd decide between coming up with some radically creative entrepreneurial idea to start turning my own life, and my community's life, around, or getting the hell out of there. But I'd insist on it being my own idea and my own decision.