Basic income isn’t Marxist. The best way to think of it is as moving the starting line for the capitalist endeavor since the free market no longer provides for the health and well-being of most folks. Globalization and technology aren’t going to slow down; if anything they’re speeding up.

The thing that everyone forgets is that the middle class is incredibly vital to the stability of a country AND nearly impossible to foster. That’s why most countries don’t have a middle class. It needs both a vibrant, evolving safety net and enough freedom so the market can still produce winners and losers based on actual performance. In short, you need just enough risk, which can be hard to gauge.

Of course, any effort of late to mitigate the risks of our dog eat dog economy is seen as TYRANNY.

The thing people forget is prior to the rise of every left-wing despot, there was an excess of free-market brutality and corruption. Hugo Chavez was able to grab power because Venezuela couldn’t tame its own rabid capitalists. Look at Cuba prior to Castro. The failure to rein in the animal spirits of the free market consistently courts the pendulum to swing too sharply, leading to excess and totalitarian impulses.

Here’s a rare exception. While the rest of the world fell into fascism and communism in the 1930s, there was the US. The New Deal didn’t plunge us into gulags and show trials or goose-stepping and gas chambers. Instead, it tempered the catastrophe of the New Depression and set up one of the great economic runs in the history of the world. WW2 was vital to that effort as well, but what was WW2 but a massive government program that pushed the US to full employment? You need more than government programs, you need a vibrant economy where people are building better mouse traps.

In the 1950s, the US had both. From my point of view, we can recreate that ideal, by swinging leftward with some robust programs. This, of course, makes me Karl Marx now.

But every asshole who thinks that a revitalized social safety net, including something like a basic income, will destroy FREEDOM should take a long hard look at history. The only thing that saved the free market in the 20th century in the US was our willingness to strike a balance between freedom and justice. It worked once. And it can work again.

(By the time I post this, three other people probably made the same point. Oh, Internets.)