This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 5th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Money for nothing? Well, money for existing anyway.

It's an idea being floated in Switzerland and it's been floated before the United States, some form of a minimum income.

Often proposed as a wholesale replacement of the U.S.

is $1 trillion welfare spending.

Matt Zwolinski is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego.

We talked about minimum income or min income earlier this week.

So the Swiss have collected a number of signatures to have a vote

at some point in the future on whether to grant each and every citizen of

Switzerland a basic income in the amount of 2,500 Swiss francs per month or about

2800 US dollars per month and that is an income that would be guaranteed regardless of

age, regardless of employment status. It doesn't matter whether you're working or not working.

It doesn't even matter whether you're working or not working, doesn't even matter whether you're trying to find the job.

If you want to take your money and surf on the Swiss speeches, you're free to do so according to this proposal.

All right, so this sounds a little bit like proposals from Charles Murray, who proposed I think

a few years ago a $10,000 basic income which would effectively replace the welfare state at the federal level in the United States.

Yeah, that's exactly right, though it is unclear so far whether the Swiss proposal

would replace all other existing Swiss welfare programs or whether it would merely be added in on top of them.

The details of the proposal have yet to be fully worked out.

They've merely kind of endorsed the basic idea of a basic

income guarantee over there and I take it they're working out the details now for

the for the upcoming vote. All right so so this is not tied, as you say, to any kind of employment unlike, say, an earned income

...