Let me say upfront that I know this is a controversial opinion.

It runs against the grain of what most kind, well-meaning people believe, and against what an increasingly loud chorus in technology and academia has been advocating. But I have sat with it long enough to believe it is true, and I would rather be honestly unpopular than comfortably wrong.

One of the core ideas floated over the last few years, usually sprung up by the rich class, is Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Dario Amodei of Anthropic has recently suggested that since a large share of entry to mid-level white collar jobs is going to disappear due to AI, we should start thinking about some form of taxation to fund a UBI that supports the people left behind. Elon, ever willing to rebrand anything that aligns with his self-interest, has gone a step further and coined a better-sounding term, Universal High Income (UHI).

The core idea, shared by its supporters across academia, the wealthy, and even many who are themselves struggling, is to give society a minimum cushion. A monthly sustenance that takes care of basic living, so that people are freed to focus on bigger things that benefit everyone.

On the surface, it appears a kind and noble idea.

After all, in a just society, one should want everyone to thrive, to live decently, to not have to struggle merely to exist. That is the world I want to see around me every single day.

And yet, I believe it is a seemingly noble idea wrapped around a bane for society. Because it violates the most fundamental truth of how human behavior actually works.

Suffering is the core of human existence.

It is the single strongest force in the shaping of human Character.

I believe Suffering does two things to a person.

For some, it curdles into bitterness.

They look around and ask why they were the ones chosen to suffer, while someone else seems handed an easy fate, a life untouched by the pain they were made to carry. That resentment slowly hardens into anger. And they begin to hurt the world around them, almost as a revenge for their own suffering. If they had to bleed, so should everyone else.

But there are a few who walk the opposite road. They come to believe that the entire purpose of Suffering is to become so good at it, so practiced at carrying pain, that they can become an Umbrella for others. So that the people they love, and even the strangers they will never meet, never have to be drenched in the same storm they once stood in alone.

One takes their pain and hands it back to the world. The other takes the very same pain and makes sure no one else ever has to feel it.

Most people do not know what their passion is. Most people will never know what their purpose is. More often than not, it is circumstance. It is hardship. It is the sheer weight of Suffering that forces a person to strive, to fight, to change their situation.

And because Money is the functioning rail of modern society, the rail on which nearly all of everyday life runs, the desire to make Money becomes, for most people, the engine of their Ambition. For some, it goes further. Because Money is Power, the hunger to accumulate extreme amounts of it, to wield that Power, becomes the very thing that drives them out of bed each morning.

Strip that away, and you are left with a quieter, more uncomfortable truth.

Without an innate drive to do things, most people simply do not push themselves.

Not for the lure of Money. Not for the pursuit of Power. Not even to escape their own Suffering.

There is a saying that captures this cycle better than I ever could:

History is, in many ways, just this sentence playing out on a loop.

Andrew Carnegie arrived in America as a penniless immigrant and went to work in a cotton mill as a boy, earning barely over a dollar a week. The man who would build the steel that built modern America was forged in want, long before he ever forged anything else.

Look at entire nations and the pattern only sharpens. The generation that crawled out of the rubble of post-war Germany and Japan, with nothing but ash and humiliation behind them, rebuilt their countries into economic powerhouses within a few decades. The very hardship that should have broken them became the forge that made them. Their children, raised in the comfort their parents bled for, would never have to summon that same ferocity, and largely never did.

Suffering, it turns out, is most often the very origin of greatness.

Take it away, and you take away the one thing that has made most people rise at all.

This is precisely where UBI works against its own stated intention. The noble voice behind it says: free people from worrying about their basic needs, and they will be liberated to build great things for society.

But the exact opposite is what happens when you hand people free money.

The desire to be ambitious quietly dies. The motivation to strive evaporates. The Suffering that once lit the fire is no longer there. The bottom rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy are covered. And once they are covered, the very drive to climb higher dissolves.

And none of this is hypothetical. We have run the experiment before, more than once.

In 1795, the English parish of Speenhamland introduced a system that, in spirit, was an early form of basic income. Wages were topped up from public funds to guarantee every family a minimum livelihood, indexed to the price of bread. It was profoundly well-intentioned.

And it was, by most later accounts, a catastrophe. Employers slashed wages knowing the parish would make up the difference. Workers lost the incentive to work harder than the bare minimum, since effort no longer changed their income. An entire class of laborers was slowly pauperized, made dependent, stripped of the dignity and drive that work had once given them. The cure deepened the disease.

We saw a faster, sharper version of the same thing in our own lifetime.

During the pandemic, governments rightly rushed emergency stimulus and enhanced unemployment benefits to people. But for many lower-wage workers, those benefits paid more than their actual jobs did. Why work ten hours a day for a full paycheck when you could stay home and collect most of it for nothing? Businesses desperately wanted workers back. Many simply chose not to return. There was nothing lazy in it. Just human nature, responding to the incentives placed in front of it, exactly as it always has.

It is worth pausing here, because the most serious thinkers on freedom never argued that society should let its weakest simply fall.

Even Friedrich Hayek, the great defender of free markets and the author of The Road to Serfdom, accepted that a society as wealthy as ours can and should guarantee a floor. He wrote that “some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody,” and that this kind of security could be provided to all without endangering general freedom.

But notice the line he drew, because the entire argument lives inside it.

Hayek separated two very different kinds of security.

The first was security against destitution: a minimum floor beneath which no one, especially those genuinely unable to provide for themselves, need fall. This he embraced.

The second was the security of a given standard of living, a guarantee of one’s relative comfort and position compared to others. This he warned against in the sharpest possible terms, because to deliver it the state must seize ever more control over how people live, work, and are rewarded. That, he argued, is the road to serfdom.

UBI, in its universal and unconditional form, quietly steps across that very line.

It hands a full standard of living to everyone alike, the fallen and the comfortable, the striving and the idle, with no condition attached to any of it. And the moment sustenance is severed from any need to contribute, when even the capacity to work, the very thing Hayek wanted his floor to protect, is no longer asked of anyone, you have not built a safety net.

There is also a deeper, quieter danger in all of this.

When the majority of a society comes to rest on the doles handed down by the wealthy and the political class, it does not merely lose its work ethic. It loses something far more precious.

It loses the muscle to suffer. To struggle. To build.

And a people who can no longer build for themselves become a people who must depend on others to build for them.

That dependence is never free.

A society where most people rely on the state and the rich for their basic sustenance is a society that has quietly handed over its leverage. Power concentrates further into the hands of the few who fund the doles, while the many, comfortable but captive, slowly surrender their voice, their agency, and their right to truly say no.

You do not bite the hand that feeds you. And a society that will not bite is a society that can be led anywhere.

This is the cruel inversion at the heart of UBI. Sold as the great equalizer, it may well become the great pacifier. A gilded cushion that, in softening the fall, also robs people of the very reason to ever stand up and climb.

I want a world where no one suffers needlessly. I want that more than almost anything.

But the answer to suffering was never to anesthetize it with free money. It was to give people the tools, the opportunity, and the dignity to fight their way out of it themselves.

Because in that fight, and only in that fight, is where human beings have always become who they were meant to be.

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