First published in The Province Newspaper on July 18th, 2018

The B.C. government is spending $4 million of your money to study how to give more of your money away to people who don’t work.

Premier John Horgan and Shane Simpson, the minister of social development and poverty reduction, have tasked three academics, again, to study a pet idea of the far left — guaranteed annual income or “basic income.”

The guaranteed question that needs to be answered is: Where exactly is this money for nothing supposed to come from? From people who do go to work and earn a paycheque, of course.

The seed of this idea was planted in modern discussion by economist Milton Friedman as a form of negative income tax. Basically, he argued, the complex web of welfare, employment insurance, disability payments, old age security cheques, etc., was too gangly, costly and inefficient. Obliterate the tangled social safety nets, he reasoned, and replace them with a base line of income. If you make over that minimum income level, you are in the taxed population, if you make under that, you get a payback at the end of the year to make up the difference.

It sounds plausible, in theory. But as the renowned philosopher Homer Simpson said: “In theory, communism works. In theory.”

Nowadays, our friends on the progressivist side of the spectrum like to push the notion of “guaranteed income” given to those who don’t earn it, taken from those who do earn it, while happily quoting Friedman. Only, they want to keep all the other payments on top of a new social program. The NDP-coddled Leap Manifesto even says that we should have a basic income because “no one should be forced to take work that threatens their children’s tomorrow, just to feed those children today.” Does that mean they won’t be “forced” to ride a diesel-fuelled transit bus to their barista jobs? Nobody knows, but we’re expected to pay, just in case.

This idea has lofted around in trial balloons since the 16th century when Sir Thomas More proposed it in his book, Utopia, giving rise to the term now applied to the ideal, but unattainable, harmony of man. Other than a sense of unfairness that some feel for having their wages given to someone who doesn’t work, coming up against the charitable notion that people do need a hand up sometimes, the problem with this concept is that it doesn’t work in practice.

Even in the progressivist country of Finland, which has open prisons where convicts plant flowers and pet bunnies, the idea has been tested and will soon be abandoned. In that case, 2,000 unemployed Finns were given about $900 per month. However, after the OECD found that income taxes on the working stiffs would need to be raised by 30 per cent to make the program stick, the government decided to let it go.

As we have seen in socialist dictatorships around the world, the mantra of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” has been a death sentence for both innovation and people for more than a century of experiments.

Given that nobody in British Columbia, or anywhere in Canada, is proposing to eliminate every possible social program, while firing the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats that administer them, it’s best to not waste $4 million in taxpayers’ money to learn if basic income works again, in theory.

Kris Sims is B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.