Finland Abandons Keynesian 'Helicopter Money' Economic Experiment After It FAILS Miserably

[Larry]

Could the US learn from their mistakes too?

With socialists rising to the calls of the ‘free shit army’ and the ever-more-left-leaning liberal intelligentsia imagining ever-more-creative ways to pretend to fund their massive government interventions (Modern Monetary Theory), the topic of “QE for the people” or “helicopter money” or the more academic-sounding “Universal Basic Income” is becoming ever-more-prevalent.

Why should people be forced to work? Why should people have to take responsibility for themselves? America is the land of the free to sit on your ass and receive government handouts after all.

Well, we have some more results in on the impact of Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiments - handing out free money to citizens with no strings attached.

As part of its experiment, in Finland 2,000 unemployed people aged 25-58 were paid a tax-free €560 (£490) monthly income. This was independent of any other income they had and not conditional on looking for work.

As Valuewalk reports, UBI-expert from the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath (UK), Dr Luke Martinellicomments:

"Universal basic income has ascended policy debates in recent years, motivated by the shortcomings of existing welfare systems, and our rapidly changing - and increasingly dysfunctional - labour markets.

“Yet despite the idea’s widespread appeal, there remain substantial and unanswered questions about its economic viability and political feasibility. This is why all eyes will be on Finland this Friday and why the results of its UBI experiment will be so revealing.

“We expect these results will provide us with the first really robust evidence on how UBI could affect changes in employment and people’s overall finances, as well as wider measures of wellbeing."

So what were the results?

Simple (and Dr Martinelli - and the left - won’t like it):

1. People were happier, and

2. No new jobs were created.

Results at this stage are preliminary and relate only to the first year of the study, meaning Friday’s findings are far from conclusive. But a hoped-for stimulus to levels of employment has not yet materialized, the project’s researchers said.

“The recipients of a basic income were no better or worse than the control group at finding employment in the open labour market”, Ohto Kanninen, research coordinator at the Labour Institute for Economic Research, said in a statement.

Shocker!! Who could have seen that coming?

https://archive.fo/zVtU3

Finland Abandons 'Helicopter Money' Experiment: No New Jobs Created

[Ocasio2018]

And it still would have been better overall for the Obama bailouts to go to the “Home Owners” who owed all that money, allowing them to be rid of their home mortgage debt and pumping the banks full of cash.

[Pozzed]

The argument for UBI is that it’s necessary to both abolish poverty and guarantee a standard of living after automation causes massive permanent unemployment. Automation brings abundance and lessens the demand for labor, however artificial scarcity keeps prices high and needing to work much longer than they need to just to make ends meet. The government makes farmers waste their crop yields in order to keep food prices up, the government invented a new type of property to protect certain industries (intellectual property), and UBI will ensure that people will have just enough to keep these businesses going with total control over people’s lives. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg built their fortunes on a restrictive closed source business model only possible with government protection, and Elon Musk gets massive funding from the government and benefits from the car dealership regulations with his Tesla vehicle line so naturally they will be the ones defending UBI to keep the train on the rails. The future is bleak.

[Wazoo2u2]

In the leftist media- 'the people were happier…" is all they’ll mention.

[Canuck]

The whole point of UBI is that if you live off the base income you will be the bottom of society, you will get the worst health care, the cheapest food, the cheapest housing, the oldest electronics, 15 year old 150k mile used cars, ect. Its supposed to be setup so you will be able to live off of the UBI alone without any extra income, however that income will be the benchmarker for lowest rung of society. So you definitely will see people living the neet lifestyle because all they can afford is a cheap ass computer that will barely be able to run future imageboards and they will be eating like shit and generally they will know they are bottom rung and cant complain because they dont bring in any extra income. However while it will act as a trap for the neets who will never be worth shit it will be a much needed safety net for many, people with drug abusing parents that have to join the military right out of school to get away and survive will be a thing of the past, once they turn 18 they can move out into the UBI ghettos and start making their own way be it education entertainment service or any of the other millions of options we have now. It will also make labor more valuable, with more people out of the workforce each person in the workforce will be payed higher salaries, look at the average income before women entered the workforce in the 1940’s. I dont think its a bad idea, in my mind its just a fundamental shift of how taxes will be delt with, capitalism will still be going, there will be a free market and you will be just as free to ruin your life with drugs booze and women and you will be just as free to create nationwide coorporations. Ideally if UBI is a slow steady shift into what its supposed to be we will see a quasi-capitalist influenced participatory economics system emerge, instead of your taxes going to roads and judges and police and firefighters it will be directly given to citizens to purchase free market solutions for these problems.