This is the Libertarian Podcasts from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution

he's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and a Senior Lecture at the University of Chicago.

Richard today I thought we'd talk about a few of the creative ways that government's

attempt to reduce poverty. In your beloved city of Chicago Mayor Lightfoot has proposed to pay 5,000 low income families, $500 a month for a year, in order to provide them with some economic stability.

Now we can get into the history of these universal basic income programs

later, but can you give us the arguments why people keep coming back to them?

Why is there something to them?

To say that there's something to them I think is an exaggeration but there is a kind of

model about the way in which the world works which explains why it is that these

things are always done and there are two features about it. One is it turns out that all

the administrative difficulties associated with these programs are

carefully put to one side. There is going to be $500 for each of these 5,000 families.

We will know who these families are and the money will be effortlessly transferred.

In practice, of course, that is not true.

There are probably at some level, maybe 5,000 families, maybe 50,000

families that meet the eligibility requirement. Somebody's going to have to

figure out which persons are going to get it and want. That's going to

dissipate of course a huge amount of resources so that whatever

the estimate is for the amount of money that's going to be transferred it has to be

bumped up pretty substantially to take into account the amount that's going to be

...