There are several practical and philosophical reasons a redistribution scheme like Basic Income Guarantee, or Universal Basic Income (UBI) are inconsistent with true liberalism and general human flourishing.  Even if none of those arguments mattered, an almost entirely neglected aspect of such a policy is enough for me to oppose it.

There is a real and important consequence to individual meaning and fulfillment when a universal welfare system exists.  It creates a permanent dependent class.  The compassion behind it is condescending and paternalistic, and sends a message to the heart of each recipient: “You can’t do it without me.”  That message works too well.

We all know this.  We see it in children with an unconditional parental safety net.  We see it in the past with heartfelt, compassion-based, sexist and racist institutions.  We feel it in ourselves when we’re loafing on the job in secret or getting credit someone else worked hard for.  It’s not just some WASP social construct that eats away at us, it’s our self-confidence getting flabby as the arms of another lift us over every bump in the road.

We’re hard-wired for progress.  We need it to be fulfilled.  Progress only comes when we overcome challenges.  Those challenges start with the most basic.  If we cut off access to the simple achievements, the really great ones will be well out of reach.

It’s incredibly shallow and materialistic to assume money equals fulfillment.  In some cases, it can be the biggest obstacle to it.  Unearned merit is dangerous even in small, unexpected doses.  When it’s built into a full-fledged system you can bank on, it has the power to corrode the most creative impulses and hallow out that which makes us human.

Call me flowery or dramatic.  Call me cold or callous.  Call me whatever you like, but there is no denying that being taken care of when you’re not truly helpless is destructive to an individual’s sense of self and chances for success.  Just because this problem cannot be quantified does not mean it can be safely ignored.

Have some respect for your fellow human.  Have some respect for yourself.  Don’t demand a perpetual redistribution system.  Demand freedom and earn and give generously and of your own volition.  Guaranteed comfort is a subtle, sinister form of captivity.  It may seem to promote tranquility, but tranquility is not always desired.  It may quell the very restlessness and rebellion a free society needs to grow and progress – and individuals within that society need to do the same.

This is not about manufacturing obstacles to toughen people up.  It’s about removing obstacles, even when they’re covered in velvet and smell like roses.

Compassion and respect for human life compel me to oppose the Universal Basic Indignity of a guaranteed income scheme.

A lot of people tell me they are interested in teaching, researching, writing, and exploring ideas for a living but they see the backwards, warped incentives baked into academia and want no part of it.  They feel stuck.

“But I can’t teach without certification”, or, “But I don’t know how to do what I want without becoming a professor.”  Fortunately, these fears are unfounded and opportunity abounds.  Unfortunately, if these fears loom large you might already be too schooled into a permission-based approval-seeking mindset to seize on the opportunity.  Anyone can do it, but years of being rewarded for the opposite of enterprise will make it a monumental task.

There are countless examples of professional intellectuals outside the stale, subsidized halls of academia.  Maria Popova, Alain de Botton, Steve Patterson, Dan Carlin, Nassim Taleb, and academic escapees like Thaddeus Russell and Tom Woods, to name just a few.  Whatever you think of their work, they have created successful careers around the ideas they love, free from the suffocating mediocrity of educrats.  And whether or not you like their conclusions, the quality and quantity of their work and their relationship to their audiences are orders of magnitude better than it would be if they were Academics.  Incentives matter.

So how can you do it?

It’s the simplest, hardest thing in the world.  Work.

Create.  Produce.  Ship.  Repeat.

Yes, research, read, study, dive in to ideas.  That’s a given.  Every wannabe intellectual does that.  To make a real career out of it requires constant, consistent action.  Write articles and books, make podcasts and videos, share and build an audience on social media, curate an email list, and create a findable brand around your ideas and work.  Just keep producing.  Relentlessly.

There is massive demand for interesting ideas and those who can find and communicate them well.  There is a huge market for what you’re peddling.  But if you see yourself as the deserving recipient of charity so you can read and write an article once in a while, you’re going to get nowhere in the real world.

Follow comedians.  They have a similar product.  They are selling their particular batch of ideas and insights and the particular way they communicate them to create a laugh.  Substitute “a-ha” for “laugh” and the professional intellectual is the same.  Do aspiring comedians sit around and say, “Well I really want to do comedy, but I don’t want to sit through years of comedy certification school and jump through all the hoops, so I guess I can’t”?  It’s as absurd as thinking academia necessary to be an intellectual.

Comedians just keep doing open mic nights.  Then low-pay shows or contests.  Then more.  They build a following of friends.  Then locals.  Then they travel a bit.  They share their stuff with their followers.  They make videos.  They grind.  They refine their jokes.  They write more.  Produce, share; produce, share.  It’s not a complicated formula.

Of course, your ideas have to be valuable to others.  And you have to produce and share them.  Maybe that explains why many seek the corrosive comfort of ill-gotten income in the higher ed bureaucracy.

If you want to spread ideas for a living, open your eyes to the world around you.  Don’t see roadblocks (“I don’t know how to edit video”, “I’m not savvy on websites and SEO”).  Those are good for you.  They’re keeping out those too lazy or fearful to learn (learning is often hardest for the most schooled) or partner with those who can.  That means more opportunity for you.  The world is wide open and it’s waiting for your ideas and your voice.

What have you created today?

PS – I’ve been speaking here about getting your income from your intellectual endeavors.  This isn’t the only, or best, way to be an intellectual outside of academia.  You can earn a living doing anything others value and still have plenty of time to research, write, and share ideas.  Most people who do earn their living from their ideas began doing it on the side, and many of the best thinkers I know don’t earn their bread exclusively from their erudition.

College is dead.

I’m not talking about the future, I’m talking about the present.  Most people just don’t know it’s dead.

It’s not online courses and video lectures that killed it.  Access to information is not a problem in the developed world, and not what college students are buying.  MOOCs aren’t nearly as disruptive as what killed college.

It’s not new certifications that killed it.  Compare the value of “I’m certified in Facebook ads”, with, “Here are my last five Facebook ad campaigns.”  Centralized credentials are only valuable in the absence of something better.

Today, something far better is available to everyone.

Here’s my Voice & Exit talk explaining what I mean.

Had a great time on this segment discussing the opportunities available today to young people to build a career without debt and years of classrooms.

https://youtu.be/B03CW6DV03w

Humanitarian that I am (you’re welcome), I’m always looking for ways to increase efficiency for all parties.

I think controversial speakers and the protesters who oppose them are spending far more resources than necessary on their antagonistic charade.  Imagine instead if a polarizing speaker ran a KickStarter campaign such that, if the right amount of money was raised, they would cancel their speaking tour.

Protesters spend a few bucks on signs and transportation, plus hours organizing and yelling.  But with a donation, for just $5-10, they could signal their disdain for the speaker to their friends and help prevent them from speaking in an instant.  They could even have donation parties to maintain the social aspect of protesting.

It’s great for the speaker too.  Say the speaker earns $10k per speech and gives 20 per year.  They also give up lots of time traveling, etc.  They could create a threshold of $250k, and if met, they’d cancel the whole slate of talks.  Everybody wins!  They’d probably get more publicity digitally than speaking to crowds of a few hundred or thousand anyway.  As long as the haters shell over the annual sum, the speaker could remain comfortably off the road year after year.

To further capitalize on their polarization, a controversial speaker could even run a bidding war, where supporters could donate to get them speaking, and detractors could donate to keep them from speaking.  Whoever raised the most gets their wish.  This would have the added benefit of helping observers see who really had a larger, more passionate following.

Everybody gets to signal.  Everybody saves time and money.  Enemies don’t have to personally encounter one-another, and neutral bystander don’t have to deal with disruptive events and protests.

Markets really do make everything better.

These lessons took me a long time to learn.  They still take a lot of work to implement and re-implement every day, week, month, and year.  I don’t know if I’ll always view them as the three most important life/career lessons, but they definitely were for the first decade of my grownup life, and nothing has yet supplanted them.

The below is adapted from weekly emails I send to Praxis participants and alumni.  These three were originally sent to the first ever Praxis class in their last three weeks of the program.  They’re also included in the book Forward Tilt.

Lesson #1: Don’t Do Stuff You Hate

(I later wrote a whole book on this one).

Surprisingly, this is one of the hardest to learn.

Maybe it’s the Puritan ideal that suffering through drudgery purges the soul, or maybe it’s the guilt, shame, fear, and obligation we allow to take on from others in the name of altruism. Whatever the cause, we are surrounded with voices, both inner and outer, that subtly nudge us into doing a lot of things that we really don’t enjoy at all. If you step back and ask, “Do I actually want to be doing this?” you might be surprised at how many things get a no.

This doesn’t mean don’t do anything hard. It doesn’t mean don’t do anything painful.  I ran a marathon once. The training sucked. Many times while running, I felt I would rather be sitting on the couch with a beer. But I didn’t actually want that.  I wanted it in a vacuum, but the real world has trade-offs.  In the world of trade-offs, though I wanted the beer and the couch, I wanted to be able to finish a marathon more. I endured pain and hardship because I wanted what it would bring me.

Avoiding things you hate requires ruthless self-knowledge and self-honesty. Do I really not want to do this thing, or am I only avoiding it out of a lack of self-esteem, or lack of focus, or laziness? You can’t feel embarrassed about what you discover.

As a personal example, I do not enjoy phone conversations with extended family members, or with friends I don’t know very well. I used to feel bad about this preference, and subject myself to many long phone conversations that I didn’t enjoy at all (and which I’m pretty sure the other party didn’t enjoy either). It was a weird, guilt-based obligation. Eventually I stopped taking or returning such calls.  Now I tell people I’m not much of a phone person, but shoot me an email, and let’s talk when we next see each other.

Once I internalized this lesson, I made it one of my daily, weekly, and long-term goals: To reduce more and more the numbers of things I do that I do not enjoy. Perhaps surprisingly, the more I focused on and succeeded at this, the more hard work I ended up doing. You might imagine pursuing this goal would result in me sitting around a lot (with beer and football), but it turns out that when you’re doing things you like, you actually work well and you want to work. I became more and more productive.

Lesson #2: Do Things All the Way

As long as you’re not doing something you hate, you should do the shit out of whatever you’re doing.

This does not mean only go all in for things you love. It’s to hard to know what counts. What this does mean is that, as long as you don’t hate it, you should do it with everything you’ve got. There are three primary reasons for this.

First, you’ll do everything better when you do it to the best of your ability. Don’t let yourself off the hook with an effort that’s less than your best. Your time is too valuable to spend doing something halfway.  Get results.

Second, you will be many times happier and more fulfilled if you work your ass off. Every one of us has this nagging feeling of self-doubt and unease when we’re taking it easy with work, activities, and projects. When you’re busting your ass, you feel pride.  It’s a good feeling.

Third, pouring yourself into what you’re doing now is the best way to increase the likelihood of finding and succeeding and what you’ll do next. Opportunities come to people who get shit done, and to those who do so with passion. Skills are acquired and networks built by those who kick ass. By pouring yourself into the now, you’re creating value and doing yourself justice in the present, and you’re also building the foundation for what comes next.

 Lesson #3: Be More Than What You Do

The final important lesson in my trio, and the last idea in this book: Be more than what you do.

Considering Lesson #2, it might seem odd for me to suggest you should be more than what you do. After all, doesn’t “doing it all the way” mean living and breathing your work, with everything you have? Yes. Absolutely yes – so much so that I don’t think you’ll ever achieve #3 unless you first master #2.

Somewhat of a paradox. When you’re really immersed in something you discover things about your true self, and you gain abilities and insights that help you awaken to a fuller version of you. The feeling of being “in flow” is an experience of the self, and it exists outside of the particular activities that might have activated that state.  That broader self is something you want to always stay in touch with.  There are huge benefits if you do.

Being in touch with your broader self makes you better at what you do.  When you can both live and breathe your work and yet not take it personally or feel despair over failures, you are unstoppable. You want the win more than anything, but when it doesn’t come, you’re fine, because you’re more than that win. You’re bigger. This mindset is a tough one to earn, but it can be done. When a mistake, or an angry customer, co-worker, or boss can ruin a day, remember – this is just something you’re doing. This isn’t you.  If it fails, you don’t fail.

A good test to see how well you’re dually maintaining an all-in mentality and an “I’m more than this” mentality is the shock test. If you quit what you’re doing right now and did something totally different, would your friends and family and coworkers be shocked?

They should be.

If they say, “What? You’re doing something else? But you lived and breathed that job/business/vision/project!” that’s a sign that you were in it and living it and extracting all the value out of it that you could. You did it so fully that others saw you as inseparable from it.  But all along you were and are so, so much more.

This happened to me with the first major career change I made.  I was surprised to find how surprised those around me were that I was taking my skills and passions to a new arena.  I took it as a good sign and resolved to surprise more people every time I took a new step.

Be more. Be a lot more than what you’re currently working on. But never be more in a way that takes you out of the moment, or that limits your ability to be engaged.

If people heard you were changing direction and said, “Yeah, she was never really into it, so I’m not surprised,” then you haven’t been fully engaged. (Unless, of course, the thing you’re quitting is something you don’t like at all, in which case you’re working on #1. The better you get at #1, the less this will be the case.  At some point, everything you move on from should seem like a shock because you loved it so much!).

Don’t ever live life without being fully engaged. You’re capable of so much more than that, and you deserve everything that being more has to offer – the depth and richness and fullness of experience that it brings.

Get the book Forward Tilt free, and check out weekly episodes of the Forward Tilt Podcast for more stuff like this.

A Professional* Skeptics’ job is to poke holes in any ideas that run counter to mainstream official narratives.

A Professional* Conspiracy Theorists’ job is to poke holes in any ideas that are part of mainstream official narratives.

A skeptic isn’t a Professional*, and doesn’t have a job, but a habit of questioning both of the above.

All three are valuable, because each can unearth truths the others cannot.

*Someone whose brand is wrapped up in Skepticism/Conspiracy, whether or not money is involved.

There is a revolution happening in higher education. It’s happening without fanfare. It’s in what futurist investor Peter Diamandis might call the “deceptive phase”. This revolution is the rediscovery of a longstanding idea that somehow got lost in the last century or so: apprenticeship.

The Loud Nothing

Higher education is a popular target for reformers. For at least a decade there have been protests over student debt, which averages well into five figures per student (six figures is not uncommon). Blame is lobbed everywhere. Tuition has risen faster than any other good – more than 500% in the last few decades – fueled by growing demand fueled by subsidy and government-backed loans fueled by a belief that, without college credentials, everyone will be poor and have fewer career options. Ironically, credential-chasing is making people poorer and limiting their options.

More than half of college grads have no job or a job that does not require a degree. Employers find little to no value in whatever colleges are supposed to be teaching (which comes as a major surprise to grads; take a look at how they think they’re prepared vs. how employers think they aren’t).

Debates rage. Some propose forcing taxpayers to fork over even more money for more college for more people. Some propose caps on tuition, or student debt forgiveness, or new laws requiring employers to pay more. Some propose new subjects, teaching methods, programs, and efforts to cajole young people into majoring in whatever field is the economic fortune teller’s flavor of the month. “We need more STEM!” “We need more critical thinkers!” “We need more….”

All of these collectivist approaches are fundamentally arrogant and irrelevant, however well-intentioned their advocates. The funny thing is, while pundits wring their hands and raise their voices with clueless frustration, the market is on the move…

The Silent Something

I read a long and thoughtful policy paper the other day (ok, I skimmed it…it was pretty boring) about apprenticeship as a potential solution to problems plaguing higher education. It came to a predictably safe and meaningless conclusion: apprenticeship could be beneficial, but there are complications that must be worked out.

Meanwhile, in the real world where real people have real skin in the real game, apprenticeship is already undermining the old apparatus and freeing people and businesses from the costly credentialist conveyor belt.

It turns out self-interest, entrepreneurial risk-taking, and profit and loss signals are sufficient to induce radical change in a stagnant industry (I guess Adam Smith was onto something). It didn’t take think tanks, wonks, and talking heads putting together a “sound plan” for a “bold future”. It didn’t take ballots or protests. It took individuals pursuing their own dreams, bucking peer pressure and the status quo of religious devotion to debt-fuelled four-year binge drinking and test-taking. Innovation beats politics.

I’m speaking from personal experience. I’m one of these individuals and my skin is in this game. I staked everything on the value to young people of gaining great apprenticeships and becoming entrepreneurial creators outside of the classroom when I launched Praxis. I’m not talking theoretically, I’m seeing these young revolutionaries do it every day.

This revolution isn’t anything that needs to be designed by planners, or gain consensus. It’s not a revolution for “society” or other abstract collectives. It’s an individual revolution. One by one, the best and brightest are opting out of classrooms and breaking down the wall between learning and doing. They’re apprenticing at real businesses, creating real value, and gaining the skills, knowledge, network, experience, and confidence needed to succeed in less than a year for zero cost.

The New Apprentice

What kinds of individuals are leading the apprentice revolution?

Apprenticeship isn’t just for welders, and startups aren’t just for coders. The apprentice revolution is driven largely by eager, hard-working generalists. Young people who don’t yet have a specialized skill set or specific life plan. They want to create value and they know they won’t find a perfect career without testing a lot of things. They’re doing things like sales, marketing, customer service, product development, and an array of activities too varied to be labelled. They’re doing this primarily at startups and growing small businesses – places that need talent, but can’t afford a cubicle farm of coffee-fetching interns. They see the unique benefits of an apprenticeship vs. the standard approach.

It’s easier than ever to start and grow a business. Talent is the biggest constraint faced by every growing company. College credentials are not only killing the classroom, they’re losing all of their signalling power to employers. Today, young people must find a better way to signal their ability to create value. The best companies are looking for the best talent based on what they can do and prove, not lifeless bullets on a resume. They’re turning to apprenticeship.

A Way of Life

The apprentice revolution is not just a better way to learn and work. It’s a better way to think and live. It’s deeply rooted in a philosophy of personal autonomy, growth, and innovation. It’s about freedom, not just in theory or legal code, but in each person’s daily life. It’s built around the idea of free exchange and value creation, not obedience and entitlement.

Rather than the passive, rule-following mindset bred by an education system isolated from the dynamic market, the apprentice approach is fully immersed in commerce and requires creativity and insight to meet the needs of others.

A free and prosperous society emerges from the actions of free and prosperous individuals, not slavish students of arbitrary facts. It emerges when we’re not looking, and in ways the intelligentsia don’t expect. The revolution in higher education is already here. It’s not on the evening news. Instead, it’s quietly creating the products and services you’ll be buying tomorrow.

Forget politics. The real rebels and revolutionaries are building the world without anyone’s permission. Apprenticeship is but one example in one area. Opportunity abounds.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Thirteen years ago, age 20 and grappling with how to make the world freer, my good friend Leon Drolet (I think only the second time I met him) handed me photocopied article from Liberty magazine.  He’d heard I was a Christian, and though he was not, he made several copies of this article and handed them out to every Christian he knew in the political realm.

The article changed my life.  It put into words so many things I felt but couldn’t articulate.  It generated a burst of mental freedom and set me on a trajectory that altered my intellectual and professional life.  I had a great appreciation for theology, philosophy, ethics, and the concept of free-will.  I had a great appreciation for the science of human action and free-market economic principles.  I knew these things were not in conflict, but I lacked the lexicon to describe how two paths (for me, represented by Milton Friedman and C.S. Lewis) led to the same conclusion about the unnecessary evil of government.

Legate described it for me.  I’m not objective enough to determine whether the article itself is really great or if it’s just the time in my life when I read it.  Regardless, it’s been lost and found on and off over the years, so I’m thrilled to have pinned down a PDF of the issue in which it appeared.

I’ve uploaded a file below of just the one article for my own records and remembrance.  But you can enjoy it too!

The Call of Christ to Freedom, by Stephen Legate