The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has gained increased popularity over the last few years. While it used to be a fringe group that supported it there are now prominent advocates for the concept of a universal basic income like Elon Musk. The basic idea is simple and has been around in some form or another for a long time. Every human being would be entitled to a periodic income that would not be affected by your social, academic or career background. This system would be a big change for our current economy and it would have a massive impact on society. But what speaks for and against this idea and how could it be implemented?

What do the supporters say?

The supporters of a universal basic income think that it could revolutionize the way we see employment. These people see a massive problem with the current incentive structures in the work force. People work because of extrinsic motivation like money or pressure from their boss and this movement wants to achieve that people work because of intrinsic motivation, their passions and what gives them meaning in life.
Another key argument supporters of a UBI mention are the growing dangers of massive job loss because of the ongoing automation. There are many people that believe that the further development of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will lead to a massive unemployment rate because many low skill jobs can be easily replaced by robots that do a better job without receiving any pay. If this scenario became reality then a lot of people would be left with a large amount of free time they would have to will with new hobbies, projects and other endeavours.

What do the opponents say?

The opposing site of this discussion sees a big danger in this idea. While the supporters see a society changing opportunity in the new incentive structure the opponents see it as a fundamental flaw of the idea. They think that there will be no motivation for working any more. Another criticism of a UBI is the way of financing this concept. Where would the money come from? That is a question a lot of people are concerned about. What is also a concern for a large amount of people is that most of the proposed models would involve the government providing this universal basic income which would make many people dependent on the government. This would provide the government with a lot of new power.

(img source: http://www.masstlc.org/universal-basic-income-what-weve-learned/)

Implementation

There are different concepts for how a basic income could be implemented. As I mentioned earlier most of them consist of the government distributing an equal amount of money to everyone. This would lead us to another question: If so many people would lose their jobs, where would all of the taxes come from needed to fund this basic income? The idea of the basic income is often combined with big changes in the tax system. One idea which was uttered for example by Bill Gates is that you could put a heavy tax on robots because robots would be the main reason for the massive job loss. This tax would be high enough to compensate the lack of income tax being payed by workers but it would still be low enough for robots to be profitable. Another idea would be to implement a transaction tax that would tax every transaction which would make your tax bill very dependent on how much money you earn. This would be hard to implement due to the many payment methods availible the government can’t control what probably won’t surprise any Steem user. All of the payment methods that the government doesn’t have any control over like bitcoin or all of the other crypto currencies would have to be banned to make this tax effective.

But there are other concepts of how a UBI could work. I recently discovered a new project that takes a completely different approach. The project is called “Mannacoin”. It is a cryptocurrency that aims to combine blockchain and the idea of a universal basic income. Just like Bitcoin this currency can be mined and traded between different accounts. What makes this currency special is that in the spirit of a universal basic income everybody gets a small amount of manna coins weekly. What makes their concept so different is that it’s not the government that distributes the money, it is done by a private company or in this case a non-profit-organization. That eliminates a lot of the concerns people have with the usual proposition. This fundamental distinction makes this project very unique, interesting and it shows the real impact blockchain could have on the world.

If you are interested in this project and you want to start receiving free Manna coins every week, I would be very thankful if you use my referral link:
https://www.mannabase.com/?ref=ac22f0d1c7

(img source: http://www.grantcoin.org/2017/07/07/introducing-manna-grantcoin-2-0/)