Editor: The more Stephanie Blaine of Stillwater writes, the more bizarre ideas she comes out with. The Universal Basic Income concept that Stephanie supports and claims was the brainchild of Thomas Paine, and is therefore a brilliant idea, isn't.

Editor:

The more Stephanie Blaine of Stillwater writes, the more bizarre ideas she comes out with.

The Universal Basic Income concept that Stephanie supports and claims was the brainchild of Thomas Paine, and is therefore a brilliant idea, isn't. You don't have to be an idiot to come out with idiotic ideas.

Stephanie comes across as intelligent as evidenced by the two well-written letters I've seen. It's the content of those letters that I believe is off the wall. Stephanie will note that Paine's "alleged brilliant idea" didn't make it to the Constitution did it?

Stephanie then goes on to list a litany of states and countries that have tested or are contemplating installing UBI, without giving any results, because she can't.

UBIs are a form of socialism, and socialism doesn't work longterm. Margaret Thatcher said it best: "Socialism works until you run out of other people's money." Stephanie says that UBIs can't be socialism because socialism wasn't invented until 80 years after Paine. That is wrong because a voluntary form of socialism goes back to biblical days and the same form was tried by our earliest Puritan settlers in the 1600s. Many of them starved the first winter and they went back to free enterprise. It was Marx and Engels who came up with mandatory socialism later in the 1800s.

Nowhere in our body of law are humans meant to provide for themselves or that they must work. Our body of law, namely our Constitution, is based on the Ten Commandments and the Judeo-Christian ethic. Second Thessalonians 3 verse 10, says, "If a man will not work he shall not eat." She says that having to work is slavery. No, you deciding not to work and then making other working people support you, that's slavery.

Andrew Borisuk Jr.

Vernon