This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 9, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Is Universal Basic Income a way to get more human brain power off the sidelines?

Some consequentialist libertarian thinkers... brain power off the sidelines.

Some consequentialist libertarian thinkers believe so.

Otto Letto is a PhD student at King's College in London.

We spoke last month in Las Vegas.

Universal Basic Income is an idea that gets kicked around a lot.

You know, you hear it mostly from left-wing people, Democratic politicians or academics,

but there are sub-liber libertarians who make the case for a universal basic income.

And I think the case that you and your co-author here, Miranda Perry Fleischer, make in discussing

universal basic income is Fleischer make in discussing Universal Basic Income is that it could do a lot to get people out of their ruts in a way that our current patchwork of welfare programs do not in fact actively

discourage. So what is that what give me the general pitch.

Well the general pitch is this.

And you say rightly that today it's associated with the left but really if you go back for example

of the Nixon administration, they were the first to really almost get this on the national agenda.

And Milton Friedman being the economic advisor there means that there's a long libertarian pedigree here.

The idea is that having a simple system of poverty relief which grants all citizens access to unconditional basic

sufficient level of income. No strings attached, no questions asked would be,

more efficient and more streamlined and more market friendly approach

to helping poor people.

Okay so just to be very clear the strains of libertarianism that might endorse this are broadly consequentialists, right?

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