Elon Musk recently posted a pronouncement on X: "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI." Andrew Yang cheered. Sam Altman concurred. Their message: AI is coming for your job, and only the government can save you.

This is not a new script. It is the latest performance of a very old play, recycled with each tech wave since the Luddites smashed textile looms in 1811. What's new is the speed and sophistication of today's AI. With a skilled user, large language models can draft legal briefs, debug code, and diagnose medical images. Boston Consulting Group estimates that 10 to 15 percent of U.S. jobs could vanish within five years—and some consider that too conservative.

The anxiety is understandable, as is the appeal of UBI as a solution. Yet the arguments for a universal basic income rest on economic fallacies, fiscal fantasy, and a basic misunderstanding of human nature.

At the heart of every call for UBI lurks the lump-of-labor fallacy—the mistaken belief an economy contains only a fixed amount of work to be done. So, automation must produce permanent unemployment. This zombie idea refuses to stay dead no matter how many times history kills it.

In 1964, a committee of scientists warned President Johnson that computers would create mass joblessness requiring a guaranteed income. In the 1990s, pundits predicted ATMs would eliminate bank tellers. Yet each time, new industries and new categories of jobs emerged—jobs that were unimaginable beforehand.

In 1900, some 41 percent of Americans worked in agriculture; today, less than 2% do. We didn't get mass permanent unemployment. We got software engineers, physical therapists, data scientists, and countless other professions.

The new AI prophets of doom suffer from a failure of imagination. They simply cannot envision what work the future will bring, so they conclude it will bring none. That's an especially poor basis for sweeping government programs that would transform the relationship between citizen, work, and state.

A few free-market thinkers, from Milton Friedman to Charles Murray, have proposed versions of UBI. Murray's plan may be the best. He has proposed a $13,000 annual grant in place of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and every means-tested welfare program. This would cost less than what we spend now.

This is very unlikely to happen. In the real world, Washington would stack a UBI atop existing programs, adding trillions to a budget already careening toward insolvency.

Beyond the fiscal objections lies a deeper problem. UBI would corrode the very virtues we need most, trapping millions in dependency and purposelessness.

The rare, highly disciplined person might use, say, an extra $13,000, for school or a small business. But take someone struggling with addiction or learned helplessness. Would an extra 10 grand cause him to sprout entrepreneurial wings? Not likely. It would just make idleness more tempting and more debilitating.

As Marc Andreessen put it in 2023: A “Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud."

Incentives matter. If offered something for nothing, many of us will take it—even when the long-term result is despair.

Musk's vision rests on a category error: that eliminating material scarcity would eliminate unhappiness. But we have been eliminating scarcity for over two centuries. Yet depression, anxiety, suicide, and social isolation keep rising. Clearly, the main problem is not that we lack abundance. The problem is that too many of us lack purpose, community, and transcendent hope—goods that no government check can buy.

The American Founders grasped this. They promised citizens not happiness but the right to pursue happiness—something attained through value-creating work, faith, virtue, and relationships. Any policy that short-circuits that pursuit, offering ease at the cost of agency, is hostile to real human flourishing.

What we need in response to AI disruption is policies that encourage flexibility, retraining, and entrepreneurship. We need communities—families, churches, civic organizations—that provide support and meaning when markets shift. And we need a culture that affirms the dignity of all honest work, from plumbing to coding to whatever is just over the horizon, and that resists the siren song of something for nothing.

Champions of UBI promise liberation but would deliver dependence. They predict abundance but mistake material comfort for fulfillment. The deeper happiness of earned success is a future worth building, worth defending, and worth the struggle. And it is a future no machine can deliver.

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Jay W. Richards, PhD, is Vice President for Social and Domestic Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

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