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Fears of automation-induced mass unemployment are at the heart of increasingly popular calls for a universal basic income (UBI).

Though the idea has been kicking around for centuries, it really caught fire recently because of Andrew Yang, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and to be mayor of New York City in 2021. His new memoir and political party, both called Forward, put a UBI at the center of his agenda. Last year, polls showed a majority of voters favoring the idea, and cities like Los Angeles, St. Paul, Atlanta, and Newark are experimenting with or considering local UBIs.

Yang tells Nick Gillespie that cash payments are better than government programs for the same reason that the libertarian economist Milton Friedman advocated slashing social welfare in favor of direct subsidies to the poor—because it’s more effective and humane to put unrestricted cash directly in the hands of those who need it.

But has automation actually led to fewer jobs in the past? And what does America’s experience with COVID-related stimulus checks that went to 90 percent of households and enhanced unemployment benefits suggest about the seriously negative effects of a UBI on labor force participation and the federal balance sheet?

Related: “Andrew Yang: ‘Political Violence Is Becoming More and More of an Inevitability.'”

Edited by John Osterhoudt. Additional graphics by Regan Taylor, Isaac Reese, and Lex Villena.

Photos: mrsiraphol – www.freepik.com; Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Creative Commons; Liu Jie Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Creative Commons; Everett Collection/Newscom; Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Creative Commons; Paul Weaver/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Creative Commons; Tesla; Richard B. Levine/Newscom; C. Neil Decrescenzo/ZUMA Press Wire/Newscom; Yichuan Cao/Sipa USA/Newscom; Mark Reinstein/ZUMA Wire/Newscom; Lev Radin/Pacific Press/Newscom;

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Republican senators clashed with Attorney General Merrick Garland during a tense Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. At issue was the Justice Department’s recent memo instructing national law enforcement agencies to protect local school boards from the alleged threat of violently angry parents attending school board meetings.

Garland denied that his memo called for the FBI to police parents upset about school curriculum issues and other policies. He also equivocated on whether a letter from the National School Board Association—which had called irate parents a potential source of “domestic terrorism”—had prompted his department to act.

Mainstream media reporters seized on an exchange between Garland and Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Tex.). Aaron Rupar, formerly of Vox and Media Matters, described the moment as “Cruz defending Nazi salutes at school board meetings.”

Ted Cruz defends Nazi salutes at school board meetings pic.twitter.com/9FJHJ97rFE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 27, 2021

Similarly, The Daily Beast headlined its article, “Ted Cruz Defends Parents Doing Nazi Salutes at School Board Meetings.” And on MSNBC, host Ari Melber said Ted Cruz “appeared to defend the right to do the Nazi salute, saying it’s ‘free speech.'” In response, National Review‘s Charles C.W. Cooke correctly noted that Cruz isn’t merely “saying” it’s free speech: “It is free speech. Garland agreed because he, too, knows it’s free speech.”

Clearly, something was lost in translation. For one thing, the parent doing the Nazi salute was not a Nazi; the parent was accusing the school board of being Nazis. (That is of course hyperbolic, though accusing one’s political enemies of being Nazis is a time-honored tactic beloved by both left and right.) More importantly, Cruz was not defending the content of the speech; he was pointing out that it was protected by the First Amendment. As Cruz asserted, and as Garland agreed, parents have the First Amendment right to holler at the school board. And he did not pick this example at random; he cited it because the National School Board Association had mentioned it in its letter. Cruz was arguing, correctly, that First Amendment–protected activities should not be conflated with violent threats. [OK?]

Feel free to dunk on Ted Cruz when he deserves it. In this case, he doesn’t.

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President Joe Biden’s plans for two years of free community college appear to have been scrapped from his “Build Back Better” spending extravaganza.

In an address to Congress back in April, Biden announced a $109 billion plan to make community college free, resurrecting a plan the Obama era that ultimately went nowhere. Biden’s plan will apparently share that fate, as it was not included in the giant-yet-nevertheless-scaled-back “framework” that the White House released this morning. Instead, he’s proposing an increase to the cap for Pell Grants by $550, putting the top possible annual grant at around the $7,000 range for the neediest students.

Dumping the plan was the right thing to do—not that the White House had much choice. Biden said on CNN this month that Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and one other unnamed senator did not support the community college plan. So he didn’t have 50 votes for it.

To be clear: The problem is not that community colleges are bad. I attended one myself! But they’re already incredibly affordable, thanks to Pell Grants and scholarships. On average, a committed student pursuing an associate’s degree can already get two years of education without paying any tuition out of pocket.

Meanwhile, Biden’s proposal was not means-tested. Proponents insisted that making community college free would make it more accessible, but the actual effect would be to subsidize families who can already easily afford these reasonable costs.

And then there’s the matter of community college’s completion rates, which rarely gets mentioned in coverage of the issue. Only about 40 percent of community college students finish their education there within six years. That in itself is not a big flaw in the system: The flexibility of a small college system low-income people who have a lot of demands on their time to drop in and out as their life permits. But under Biden’s proposal, taxpayers would have been on the hook for the 60 percent who don’t make it—and this is on top of the extensive federal and state subsidies we’re already sending to our community colleges.

Don’t assume that more federal subsidies will make tighter commitments possible. Washington state has an extensive state grant program that already makes tuition free for qualifying students to attend select community colleges, but The Wall Street Journal reports that “the costs of housing, child care, transportation and books are so high in the Seattle area many students still drop out to work despite the subsidy.” The Journal‘s source for that nugget was Timothy Stokes, president of South Puget Sound Community College; remarkably, Stokes think this is an argument for more taxpayer funding, because then Washington state could somehow shift its own tuition program to a financial assistance program for these students.

Somebody needs to show Stokes this graph from the American Enterprise Institute, which shows how the costs of goods and services with heavy amounts of government regulation continue to rise. College tuition and textbooks have jumped 200 percent in price since 1997, far above the rate of inflation. From 2008 to 2010, there was a surge in Pell Grant spending. That spending has since dropped a bit, but the federal government still is spending billions more on tuition assistance than it has in the past.

Some four-year colleges lobbied against the free community college program, instead backing an increase in Pell Grant funding. The Journal explains: “Lobbyists for public four-year colleges have said states might redirect funding from their institutions. And students who otherwise would have attended four-year colleges might opt to attend community college for the first two years, depriving those campuses of a tuition source.”

That “concern” highlights the biggest problem with Biden’s proposal. Free community college isn’t ultimately a subsidy for students; it’s a subsidy for the schools themselves, and particularly school administration. Barbara Mistick, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told the Journal that the proposed system would require a gigantic new bureaucracy. Such plans always includes new systems to monitor success and to try to retain those struggling students, and a good chunk of those billions of dollars would be for paying staff.

Because community colleges are already so accessible, and because states are well-suited to devising mechanisms to keep them that way, federal subsidies would merely muddy the water—and put a straightjacket on a system that thrives on flexibility.

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A homeless veteran routinely collected money at an intersection in Gastonia, North Carolina. On October 13, he paid for that with both his freedom and his service dog.

That day, a woman phoned 911 to complain that Joshua Rohrer was “using [his] dog to get money.” That dog was Rohrer’s service animal, which he acquired for the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder he developed after completing a tour overseas in the U.S. Army. 

The operator was clearly confused. “Do you think the [dog is] in danger?” he asked. “Like, how [is he] using the dog to get money?”

“They’re using this dog to make people feel sorry for them,” the woman responded. The dispatcher then noted that he’s “not sure there’s anything illegal about that.”

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. An officer with the Gastonia Police Department arrived at the intersection, told Rohrer he was breaking the law, and asked to see his identification. Rohrer disputed that he’d done anything illegal. The officer then requested backup, apparently believing that calling all-hands-on-deck to stop a panhandler was a prudent use of law-enforcement resources. The cops insisted that Rohrer show them a state ID, which he didn’t have; he carried only his Veterans’ Affairs card. According to eyewitness accounts, he was arrested shortly thereafter.

An officer also tased his service dog, Sunshine, who ran off. Rohrer asked if they could retrieve her and bring her with him. “They laughed at me,” he told Army Times. The dog has since died, having been hit by a car.

As of press time, the Gastonia Police Department has not responded to Reason‘s request for comment.

Rohrer was booked for solicitation and for resisting arrest. The primary charge—that he was begging for money—is part of an effort to restrict panhandling, and it is not the first. Such laws have been popping up across the country, and so have constitutional challenges.

Consider the erstwhile anti-begging ban in Lowell, Massachusetts, which prohibited “aggressive panhandling.” The word “aggressive” was doing a lot of work: To violate the law, you just had to panhandle within 20 feet of a litany of public places while holding a sign asking for money. According to city officials, this was meant to repel “modern-day court jesters or buffoons,” who the city accused of “parasitism.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued, and a federal court agreed, ruling that the law was a content-based restriction, since it didn’t apply to people whose signs did not pertain to financial need. A statewide panhandling ban in Massachusetts was struck down for similar reasons in December of last year: The state Supreme Judicial Court questioned how an individual could be permitted to ask for money for newspapers or tickets to events, but not for personal charity.

Greensboro, North Carolina, also used to have a begging ban, but the city did away with it six days after the ACLU sued in 2018—a testament perhaps to how constitutionally questionable they knew the law to be.

Constitutional questions aside, Rohrer’s arrest and the death of his dog speak to the practical consequences of such statutes. People with a monopoly on force are charged with upholding all the laws. Sometimes that isn’t worth it.

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