Guaranteed income -- proponents make a fine argument but omit one important issue

There was a social experiment in a community in Canada in the '70s wherein each resident was guaranteed a minimum income. It's written about fondly at The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money by Whitney Mallett. Here are some excerpts that should provide the gist of it, to wit:

Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since. For those four years—until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away—the town's poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school. ...

"Originally the interest was primarily prompted by the concern that the welfare system was discouraging people from working,"Ron Hikel, who coordinated the Mincome program, told Dutch television last year. Today, he says, the motivation for guaranteed income is an increase in inequality. "At some point, the income inequality begins to interfere with people's ability to have education, and also to take care of their own health. To the extent that that effects the relations in society, it begins to accentuate divisions and differences, and you get an increase in social pathologies, alcohol addiction, the use of drugs, an increase in mental illness, a decrease in provision of educational courses and an increase in the crime rate."

Let's assume for a moment that a guaranteed income does not discourage the recipients from working. There's still a pretty big issue out there. And that's the fact that in order to give money to some people, you have to take it from other people. There's where the disincentive to work occurs. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."