My friends Bryan Caplan and Chris Freiman have been debating the merits of a Universal Basic Income. Chris supports the idea. Bryan does not. In his latest response to Chris, Bryan makes a few different arguments, all of which focus on the likely costs and benefits of a UBI. Bryan’s general charge is that Chris isn’t looking sufficiently hard at the empirical evidence. A UBI would be more costly and less beneficial, Bryan argues, than the system we currently have. Subscribe now One of the things I tried very hard to do in my recent book with Miranda Perry-Fleischer - Universal Basic Income: Wh ..read more

October's been a busy month, and I've been away from the Substack for a little while. I'll be back with more writing in November. But in the meantime, here is a roundup of some of my recent and upcoming activity. My book with Miranda Fleischer, Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know, came out on October 4th. You can consume it in paperback, e-book, or audiobook format. And if you want an overview, you can check out the interview that Miranda and I did with the Avid Reader Show. Reviews continue to come in for The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for th ..read more

My new book with Miranda Fleischer: Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know, launches one week from today - October 4th! You can order it now on Amazon or if, like me, you do a lot of your “reading” via audiobook, grab it on Audible. In case you missed it, I posted the Table of Contents for the book here, along with several excerpts from the book covering the main arguments for and against the UBI. Today, I want to share an excerpt that covers a question that a lot of you have asked: what’s the difference between a UBI and Milton Friedman’s idea of a Negative Income Tax? Enjoy ..read more

In my last post, I discussed six arguments that are often made in support of a UBI. Here, as promised, is the next chapter from Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know, which covers the four main arguments against a UBI. As before, the purpose of this chapter is just to lay the arguments out in relatively succinct form. We cover each of them in much more detail later in the book! (See this post for the full Table of Contents) Subscribe now CHAPTER 6 WHAT ARE THE MAIN ARGUMENTS AGAINST A BASIC INCOME? Not everyone thinks that a UBI would be a good idea. In particular, there are thre ..read more

Last week, I shared the table of contents for my new book with Miranda Perry Fleischer: Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know. The book will be published on October 4th. But in the meantime, I wanted to give you a taste of what to expect. In one of the early chapters of the book, Miranda and I lay out what we take to be the six main arguments that people have put forward in support of a UBI. We discuss all of these arguments in more detail later in the book, but the purpose of this chapter is just to lay them all out in a relatively succinct way. Of course, just because we pre ..read more

Next month, Oxford University Press will be publishing a book that I co-wrote with my excellent colleague, Miranda Perry Fleischer. The book is called Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know (Amazon link), and it’s intended to serve as a one-stop guide to everything you ever wanted to know about the history, politics, philosophy, and economics of a UBI. There are a number of other books out there about the UBI, but we think there are a couple of things that set ours apart. First, a lot of current books are essentially manifestos. They are written to convince you that the UBI is ..read more

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a review by Barton Swaim of The Individualists. Swaim’s take on the book is gratifyingly positive. His take on libertarianism, however, is quite critical. So much so that he concludes his review by claiming that The Individualists serves as an “obituary” for libertarianism. David Boaz has a nice piece over at Cato responding to Swaim’s review. And, as he speculates, John and I certainly didn’t see ourselves as writing an obituary. We set out to write the history of an idea to which we felt, and still feel, considerable attraction, but also an hon ..read more

For those of you who haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend Tim Sandefur’s recent book, Freedom’s Furies, a delightful and edifying account of three of the most important and interesting women in libertarian intellectual history: Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand. Each of these individuals was brilliant, creative, and - quite often - incredibly and destructively stubborn. Lane, for instance, once wrote in a letter to Ayn Rand about a time when Paterson had visited her home. The two women got into an argument about whether it was possible for rosebushes to grow in the shade of a ..read more

A few days ago, Adam Kissell published an essay in the American Mind, cleverly titled “New Koch.” In it, he describes the way in which the Charles Koch Foundation and related organizations such as the Institute for Humane Studies seem (to him) to have taken a leftward turn in recent years. As evidence he cites the fact that Koch organizations now talk about things like “breaking barriers” and “eliminating injustice” which, we all know, “are leftist buzzwords that signal openness to Critical Race Theory.” What’s worse, the folks at IHS are even have people reading and talking about ideas by ..read more