Thursday, December 17, 2015

Cato on Basic Income

From the Koch-funded "libertarian" institute, Cato:
Finland is moving forward with one of the most extensive and rigorous basic income experiments in decades, which could help answer some of the lingering questions surrounding the basic income....

The Finnish Social Insurance Institution (Kela) will lead a consortium of think tanks, universities, and businesses in surveying the existing literature, analyzing past experiments, and designing different models to test in Finland. They will present an interim report next March, where the government will decide which models to develop further. The consortium will present a final report in November, after which the government will choose which models to actually test. The experiment will begin in 2017 and last for two years, after which the consortium will begin to evaluate the results....

The studies only last two years, so longer-term effects over the course of a person’s life or subsequent generations will not be understood. Even with these limitations, this would be the largest and most comprehensive basic income experiment to date.

Some aspects of a basic income are intriguing.
No mention in the Cato paper of the fundamental methodological problems with such a study nor the outright violation of libertarian principle of such a redistribution plan. Yet, another reason the founding of the Mises Institute was so important, to counter the interventionist thought of those that market themselves as libertarian and free market, when they dilute such a perspective almost beyond recognition.

-RW

1 comment:

  1. There is nothing intriguing about a basic income scheme. It is foolish and will end up being counter-productive to what the architects intended it to be. It will destroy Finland. And who is gonna pay for it? Migrants, that who.

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