Moving Forward on Basic Income
What amazes me in this discussion about BI is that most people don&#x27;t seem to realize that systems similar to BI have already been tried in Europe, and that they didn&#x27;t work.<p>I come from the Netherlands, which has always had unemployment benefits. Nowadays you get those only if you meet a bunch of strict conditions but it hasn&#x27;t always been so tough. In the early eighties, there were almost no checks whatsoever. The result was that many people started to see the benefit as a &#x27;right&#x27;, and that the choice to work or not to work was a matter of personal choice. So basically the same thing that BI tries to achieve. But the result in the Netherlands was that more and more people chose not to work, or chose to do work that didn&#x27;t pay anything, or worked for black money and collect the social benefit at the same time. In the end the whole system just got too expensive and had to be adjusted to be much more strict.<p>Tl;Dr; BI is a very nice idea on paper but unfortunately becomes too expensive in practice.