There are plenty of excellent pragmatic arguments against UBI — that we don’t have the political power to institute it in any substantial way (and if we did, we would already have the power to institute socialism first, so why put the cart before the horse). Also that the Yang stipend would be a pittance and extremely vulnerable to austerity, that it would coincide with the slashing of social programs, and that the market would immediately adjust and inflate to render the payments far less ameliorative than its recipients would hope. Additionally, there are certainly convincing political arguments against UBI — that trading control of the economy for a few measly dollars would actually disempower us politically; that it’s a trick and a payoff, and we won’t be bribed to abandon the fight for worker power; that we don’t want an allowance, we want to rule the world.

I will not recount all of these arguments here, but you should certainly familiarize yourself with them, though not because UBI boosters are politically significant enough to spend too much time on. Even with Yang on the debate stage, UBI mostly remains the political equivalent of raw water, essentially an esoteric fad of pseudo-intellectual technocrats, libertarians, and the robber barons of Silicon Valley.

Nonetheless, my interest here is not to argue that UBI is unworkable (it is), and that it lies to us with a bait-and-switch false promise of security (it does); I am arguing that even if it was feasible and offered security exactly the way Silicon Valley says it will, UBI is not desirable. We know this, because we already tried it.

Betty Friedan and the UBI

Hailed as a groundbreaking feminist nonpareil, Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestselling investigation into the secret misery of suburban housewives, The Feminine Mystique, remains one of the most salient sociological exposés of the American middle-class woman. The now famous opening passage gave voice to a previously silent sea of women living comfortable lives of quiet desperation.

The book is, of course, notoriously blinkered, and certainly suffers from the blinders of middle-class ideology. Friedan’s liberalism leans heavily on psychoanalytic readings of problems of political economy, and her solution to the unfulfilled desires of middle-class women still required the domestic labor of those “other” women.

But even with Friedan’s elitist politics, the candid honesty of the subjects of The Feminine Mystique exposed something very real, something uncomfortable, inexplicable, and seemingly counterintuitive that had never been talked about before — the so-called happy homemakers living the suburban dream were truly and utterly miserable.