Would you work if you didn’t have to?

YOU wouldn’t expect this idea to work, because it makes a mockery of common sense. But it could change our society.

IF YOU were paid $30,000 by the government every year without having to lift a finger, would you still try to find work?

And if you did, would you settle for a menial job cleaning toilets, or would you demand something more glamorous?

More importantly, if in the next, say, 20 years, those toilets are being cleaned by robots, shouldn’t those now out-of-work toilet cleaners have a right to that $30,000?

These are the questions at the heart of the debate over unconditional basic income — an unconventional policy idea which argues every person should be paid a standard amount, regardless of whether they are working or not.

Like the dole, it’s meant to make sure every person in society can meet basic living standards. But it differs, in that there is no work requirement or means test — meaning you could have a job and pocket the $30,000 cash on top of your wage, or not work at all and live off the $30,000 alone.

Some conservatives like the idea because it would theoretically streamline and simplify complex systems of social security payments and subsidies, cutting down administrative costs.

It’s already being trialled in the Netherlands with 300 residents of the town of Utrecht among a number of Dutch pilot sites, while the Indian government has also embraced the idea, and previous small-scale experiments have been hailed as great successes.

A new lobby group has formed in the US, Basic Income Action, to coincide with the eighth International Basic Income Week, and the campaign to give every human being a basic minimum wage, no questions asked, appears to be picking up steam.

The group, taking a cue from recent similar campaigns around gay marriage and marijuana legalisation, has launched a petition calling on US presidential candidates to support basic income.

“Basic income is a remarkably powerful and timely idea, and Basic Income Action will be a great resource for longtime activists and people who are learning about this for the first time,” said Steven Shafarman, author of the upcoming book The Basic Income Imperative.

It’s not a new idea, but with rising under- and unemployment, increasing cost of living and low to negative real wage growth — not to mention the growing automation of menial jobs — basic income has become a popular cause of the Left.

Canadian author Naomi Klein recently released a manifesto which, along with universal childcare and an end to international trade deals, called for a universal basic income.

Next year, Switzerland will hold a referendum on the issue after a petition gained more than 100,000 signatures, although the government has come out against the idea, urging its citizens to vote ‘no’.

It’s an idea which appeals to both sides of the political spectrum.

Classic liberal economists including Milton Friedman supported the idea in the form of a ‘reverse tax’, or a threshold under which, rather than the government taking your money, it pays you.

Progressives, who often throw around terms like ‘wage slavery’ when discussing universal income, see it as a way of expanding the social safety net and elevating the human condition above the drudgery of performing soul-crushing jobs just to survive.

The key question is whether people can be trusted not to sit around doing nothing. Conservatives naturally assume the worst of people, while progressives hope for the best.

Arguments against the idea are generally that one, we can’t possibly afford it; and two, it would dampen labour market participation by removing incentive to work, putting greater tax pressure on those who do.

A study conducted 40 years ago in the tiny Canadian farming town of Dauphin, Manitoba, found the payments actually had a “social multiplier effect”, and despite the fears of a dip in labour, people still had the incentive to work more hours rather than less.

One big danger in implementing such a system, however, would be pressure from the welfare lobby to apply different loadings for various interest groups, undermining the generic distribution.

Mikayla Novak, senior research fellow with free-market think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs, wrote in 2013 that while basic income was a seductive idea for people of “varied philosophical persuasions”, it could “risk ending up as another initiative in which good intentions do not align with desirable results”.

Another common criticism of basic income is that it would lead to inflation — if everyone has more money, everything would cost more.

Writing in Medium, basic income advocate Scott Santens provides two real-world examples where that proved not to be the case: Alaska in 1982, and Kuwait in 2011. In both cases, inflation actually decreased after the government introduced a partial basic income to citizens.

Supporters argue that in general, since the income is provided by the government through existing, not printed money, the inflationary effects should be minimal.

He told Motherboard the momentum which was lost in the 1970s was coming back and, due to advances in technology, was “here to stay”.

“Step one to all of this is growing the conversation for basic income to a critical mass and connecting the people who believe it needs to happen,” he said. “And that’s what BIA is for, to grow and connect, and to win.”