The Irish government recently announced that its so-called* “Basic Income for the Arts” (BIA) program will become permanent starting in 2026. This is a victory for the arts as well as an acknowledgment that jobs might not always be the most effective way to distribute money to people.

But while subsidizing artists is a step in the right direction, it stops short of solving the underlying problem. By earmarking money specifically for “creatives,” we are still operating under the assumption that we must justify people’s income based on what they do.  We are trapped in a mindset that sees people first as workers and only second as human beings.

Forcing everyone to “earn” their money through jobs harms the environment, harms people, and squanders human potential.  Jobs take time and energy away from our families, our communities, and our leisure activities.

Why shouldn’t we want fewer jobs and less employment?  There must be something wrong with how we’ve structured our economy if reducing the need for—and use of—labor somehow makes people worse off.  Yet that’s the world we live in.

How do we escape this trap?  Well, if we continue to think of people fundamentally as workers selling labor, it limits our vision of what’s possible.  We generate jobs and wages just to keep money flowing in the economy.  The economic policy goal of full employment is axiomatic.

For environmental sustainability, the implications are stark. A full-employment economy wastes resources.  We are running the economic machine at high RPMs just to keep the engine from stalling. We are burning resources generating otherwise unnecessary “work” because we haven’t figured out another way to distribute money.

In my recent paper, “Keynesianism’s Labor Problem”, I urge us to transcend that labor-centric economic lens. We can think of people first as people, not as cogs.  And we can manage our economy from this perspective.

An efficient economy generates the maximum well-being with the minimum amount of coercion.  First and foremost, humanity is a beneficiary of the economic machine.  The less we have to use people as economic inputs, the better off we are.  People need money. They don’t need to be exploited.  And we certainly don’t need to pretend to exploit people as an excuse to hand them money.

Our economic policy goals can shift away from providing people jobs toward providing people access to the full benefit that the economy can deliver.  That’s where universal basic income (UBI) comes in.

Ireland’s artist subsidy merely plugs a gap—one of many gaps left by today’s dysfunctional labor-based money distribution system.  By decoupling income from employment, a true UBI can free us from “jobs for jobs’ sake” and allow the economy to reorganize itself around human flourishing.

We can conceive of UBI not as a way of plugging gaps in the economy, but as a radical restructuring of money distribution away from labor, workers, and wages.  A properly calibrated UBI can represent the solution to a deep problem in our economic infrastructure.  If we calibrate our UBI to a level that avoids us having to generate excess jobs, any remaining wages will pull people away from their leisure only as necessary.

Unfortunately, this is not where the UBI conversation stands today.

A great tragedy of the UBI movement is that most UBI supporters think about UBI in the context of the current labor-based economy with its full-employment paradigm and all the implications therein.  The discourse surrounding UBI has largely been dominated by ethical philosophy, political advocacy, and microeconomic analysis of poverty alleviation.   Even attempts at macroeconomic modeling fail to transcend the full-employment baggage.

People sometimes imagine UBI as a—perhaps imperfect—tool for addressing the problem of AI-induced job loss.  They see UBI as a form of safety net or social assistance for those left behind.  They rarely question why we’re living in a world where joblessness is something to fear.  They rarely notice that our society has a long history of using economic policy to generate jobs that counteract the effects of labor-saving technology.

At the Greshm Institute, we’re hoping to change all that.  In recent months, my colleague Derek Van Gorder and I  have been grateful for the opportunity to discuss these ideas on the monthly Feasta USA/North America calls. The transition to a green economy necessitates a shift to a UBI economy, and that requires moving away from the labor-entangled economics of the past.  Money distribution can be a public utility.

It’s not too early to start thinking about what kind of impact we might want to make at the 2026 BIEN Congress, August 20–22 in Toronto, Canada.  This event presents an opportunity for us to shift the UBI narrative away from safety nets and targeted pilot programs toward rethinking the economics of money distribution and the role of labor in society.

The Ireland program provides a glimpse of what’s possible, but we need to go further. If we want to maximize human flourishing while minimizing resource waste, we need to stop treating joblessness as a problem and embrace leisure as an ideal.  We need a truly Universal Basic Income.Email