This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 20th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Universal Basic Income, an idea to replace federal welfare programs is decidedly controversial.

Charles Murray argues that such a program can be justified as a less problematic alternative

to the Byzantine system of welfare programs in the U.S. today. He spoke at the Cato Institute

earlier this month. The Libertarian case for this can be made on just purely

grounds of the lesser of the evils.

That's the grounds that Milton Friedman used for his negative income tax proposal.

I would put this part of the case is saying, look, there is no way that an advanced democracy of the West

is going to get rid of massive amounts of transfer payments.

It's just not going to happen.

A libertarian dream of dismantling the welfare state

is not in the cards.

Let's strike a grand bargain with the left.

And the grand bargain is that we will let you spend an awful lot of money on transfer payments

to help the disadvantaged and your part is that you give up the role of the state in trying

to stage manage people's lives.

That's why the book is called in our hands.

In fact, there are a couple of other things that are really paramount in what I'm trying

to get at in this plan.

As I was saying to Andy before we came up here,

there's not a snowballs chance in hell

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