i was really disappointed recently to hear that the newly elected conservative government in ontario scrapped their pilot program for a universal basic income. i’ve been a fan of basic income for years and i’ve been thrilled to see it enter the mainstream recently around the world. i don’t know the numbers for how much revenue we can get with income and/or land taxes established to know whether the maldives would be able to get into a fiscal position that would allow us to have one in the immediate future, but i genuinely believe that a lot of the world is going to transition to a basic income in my lifetime.

that’s one of the reasons this setback is so disappointing. ontario was going to be a pioneer in one of the most important economic policies possibly in history, one that’ll be a fundamental change in the way humanity lives and works and what we create or produce as a society.

a universal basic income will change the basic social contract of how humankind sees its relationship with the state and each other. it’ll liberate people from the coercion of paying for survival. it’ll reshape society towards a flourishing of art and research and innovation and helping each other. people won’t be forced to shape their entire lives around paying for existence, and that means people will be freer to follow their dreams, make art, collaborate, research, educate and spread ideas. imagine the possibilities! the person who will discover the cure to cancer might be working in a minimum wage job to make ends meet right now, putting off going to university. and there’s going to be millions of people like that, around the world. tens of millions. it’ll be a flourishing unlike anything we’ve ever seen. and all the while, it lets us allow automation to boost our quality of life dramatically, without the need to keep thousands employed in manual labor so they can survive.

something even more powerful:  much like other social programs before it, universal basic income fundamentally changes what we expect of our governments and what we consider our basic rights. the rights won by suffragettes and protesters seemed distant once. the rights written down in the universal declaration of human rights felt revolutionary at the time. soon, at least in some countries around the world, the freedom to exist without paying for existence will be as obvious and natural a demand as the basic rights people expect by default now.