Say no to money for nothing

Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez and senator Ed Markey, right, unveil their Green New Deal resolution. Picture: AFP

It was 1985 when Dire Straits released their classic hit about musicians living the easy life, getting money for nothing and their chicks for free. Lead singer Mark Knopfler wrote the song after he overheard a delivery bloke in a New York department store complaining about slack-arse musicians parading around on MTV.

These days, you would be publicly flogged if you talked about men getting chicks for free. But suggest that we give people money for free? That will earn you high praise in burgeoning quarters. Except that this hoary idea is just as offensive to human dignity as offering up women for free.

Given that handing out free money to people, no strings attached, routinely gets a run, we should prepare arguments for when it arrives in Australia. After this week, the faux compassionistas on the crossbench surely need a new project. This one is right up their alley.

And this naive idea of giving people money for nothing is already making headlines in the US thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez, the shiny new Democrat congresswoman from New York. In notes released by her office last week fleshing out her Green New Deal resolution, which is backed by 70 house Democrats including almost every declared presidential candidate, she promised to provide “economic security” for people “unwilling to work”. When it hit the media, the far Left Democrat backtracked, claiming it was all a dreadful mistake.

Don’t count on it. The young Democrat, who describes her radical Green New Deal as “our moonshot”, has fast built a profile by making generic and frankly ridiculous promises about how to legislate for a compassionate world.

Why wouldn’t those on the federal parliament’s crossbench, those with dreams and no clue how to implement them in the real world, follow her moon-shooting lead?

Especially given their faux compassion win this week. Either naive or deliberately disingen­uous, the crossbenchers said the medivac law passed with Labor is about doing the right thing, to evacuate a few sick asylum-seekers to Australia for medical help. In fact, the new law will allow all asylum-seekers and refugees currently on Nauru or Manus Island to be flown to Australia despite medical services already being available to them. The real aim is to dismantle offshore processing.

There is nothing compassionate about undermining Australia’s border security and kickstarting a people-smuggling trade that means desperate people will again die at sea. But if the crossbench compassionistas can convince themselves they did the right thing there, they might soon be casting around for a new frontier of faux compassion.

Enter the old idea of a universal basic income for all to solve inequality. In the attention-seeking business much like Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Banks and her joyous band of girl-huggers might regard giving people money for nothing as a racy new talking point to cement their backsides on the green leather seats. When Banks was a Liberal MP she told ABC radio’s Rafael Epstein that she could live on the $40-a-day Newstart allowance. A few weeks ago, speaking to Epstein as a former Liberal MP, Banks changed her mind, as she has done a lot recently.

Along with the Greens, who will love this idea too, the faux compassionistas can point to a new report card from Finland. Released last week, it tracks the outcomes of a landmark experiment where 2000 randomly selected unemployed people received €560 ($890) a month, no strings attached. At first glance, going by news reports, the report finds those who received the universal basic income, compared with the control group who didn’t receive free money, were healthier and happier. You can see why the crossbenchers and Greens might be keen to bring this Scandi-style compassion to Australia.

Not. So. Fast. The results of the two-year experiment fell flat. Those who received free money were no better or worse off than the control group in finding a job. In other words, giving people money for free didn’t provide them with any new incentive to search for a job. Why would it?

And claims that giving people free money made them happier and less stressed than people on unemployment benefits with strings attached are fishy. Happier for how long? The preliminary results released last week cover only the first year of collected data.

Moreover, the report measured people’s wellbeing with a phone survey that had a poor response rate of 23 per cent. In fact, the report concludes that “it is not yet possible to draw any firm conclusions” about giving people money for free. Back to the drawing board, then. Or at least some real life ­experience, rather than utopian dreams.

Remember what happened to indigenous people in this country after a 40-plus-year experiment of money for nothing? More than a decade ago, Noel Pearson savaged the idea of “passive welfare”. Discussing the tragic life outcomes for Aboriginal people, the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien asked Pearson what drove Aboriginal people to “grog and substance abuse”.

Pearson must have shocked O’Brien with his answer. “The principal driver of it … has been time on your hands, free money, and access to the pub,” Pearson said. “Those were three factors that came into play in the 70s … those three ingredients produce a vortex of binge drinking.”

Pearson then explained the concentric circles of dire outcomes. “At first innocent, and then it draws in more and more people, then it draws the women in and it starts to undermine — grandmothers are left with the kids — and that’s when children become vulnerable then, and you create a generation where there’s been interference with children.”

Pearson pointed to the misguided Community Development Employment Projects program as a disaster for indigenous people. It didn’t lead indigenous people to real jobs in the real economy because it offered them more money to stay on government handouts.

“There’s a lot of full-time jobs in these communities that are going begging,” Pearson said. “Why should we have 50 non-indigenous people come into a community of 800 people and occupy all the full-time jobs because there’s no local takers for those jobs? We have in some communities cleaners’ jobs in schools, full-time paying jobs as cleaners in the schools, that can’t be filled by local people.”

Sadly, Pearson was right when he pointed out there was not much support from many Aboriginal leaders within communities to the idea that human dignity comes from earned success. It’s been a slow road to that idea becoming mainstream.

Yet now, astonishingly, we are on the cusp of politicians across the world — from the Five Star movement in Italy to the far Left in the US — canvassing a new round of learned helplessness from a universal basic income. It is not just economically reckless, it is morally reprehensible.

The moral depravity of handing out free money was best explained a few years ago by Oren Cass, author of The Once and Future Worker, who said it will “redefine the relationship between individuals, families, communities, and the state by giving government the role of provider. It would make work optional and render self-reliance moot. An ­underclass dependent on government handouts would no longer be one of society’s greatest challenges but instead would be recast as one of its proudest achievements.”

Last year, Arthur C Brooks, who heads the American Enterprise Institute, talked about how we’re always looking for ways to help poor people. And then he met Rick. Rick was living in a homeless shelter in New York City called Ready, Willing & Able, funded by the Doe Fund, a not-for-profit philanthropic group. Brooks found in Rick a “typical story” — a boy with absent parents, involved in petty crime, then caught up in a shooting and sentenced to prison for life at 18.

“By the grace of God, he gets out at 40,” Brooks said during a speech last year. Rick has never had a job, never had a phone, a car, a girlfriend, he’s like a kid. He starts off sweeping the streets, pushing a bucket for three months.

“Then he gets a job as an assistant exterminator, minimum wage job, which fancy people call dead-end jobs, which aren’t,” Brooks ­recalled. Brooks met Rick six months into his job killing bugs. Making small talk, the economist asked the former felon how his life was going.

“Let me show you,” Rick said, taking out his iPhone, showing Brooks an email from his boss. It read: “Hey Rick, emergency bed-bug job. East 65th street. I need you now.” Brooks didn’t understand so Rick told him to read the last bit again. “I need you now.”

“Nobody in my life has ever said to me ‘I need you’,” Rick said.

It was an epiphany for an economist who had spent his life amassing data about how to alleviate poverty.

“The problem is not that we are helping poor people too much. It is that we are needing poor people too little. It is a complete change in focus. Every policy should not be about helping more. It should be about needing people more.

“This literally changed the course of my research,” Brooks said. “I didn’t get it from the data, I got it from the man.”

It should be unthinkable for us to return to an old idea that snuffs out the moral outcomes of having a job, the sense of control over our destiny and the human flourishing it offers.

But if faux compassion is deployed to overturn sensible policies that control our borders, prevent deaths at sea and stop the people-smuggling trade, why wouldn’t faux compassion be used next to push for some imagined manna from government, of a universal basic income?

Those who are tempted towards a policy of handing out money for free should remember Rick. There is core human dignity in work.

To be sure, not all work is equal. It might be more fun being a musician rather than an assistant bug killer, but being needed, earning money from and finding worth in your own efforts beats getting money for nothing from the government. There is no self-worth in a handout, only faux compassion from misguided people who do have a job.