TGR carries the second installment of my series on UBI. I favor high levels of immigration and the existence of a government safety net, but there are policy tradeoffs that we cannot excuse ourselves from thinking about:

The hard reality is that if we create a UBI, that is the end – permanently, I would expect – of high levels of immigration. Whatever you may think about the potential immigrants is beside the point. American voters are not going to vote to tax their own salaries to provide free money for everyone in the community, and then keep the golden doors open so anyone, anywhere can join the community at any time. If the UBI passes Congress on Monday, billions for the Wall will pass on Tuesday – and we’ll be lucky if it stops with that.

The underlying difficulty is that, for all our talk about community, we continue to approach social ethics as if particular communities were irrelevant. We love community in the abstract, but we hate and fear actual communities when they make demands upon us that interfere with our “Imagine”-style fantasies. Yet it is the “Imagine”-style fantasies of a nationless world that will destroy us in the end if we cling to them:

We have no right to think about social ethics as if humanity were just a huge, undifferentiated mass, every individual perfectly interchangeable with every other individual. That is not humanity, that is cogs in a machine. All ethical schools attempting to treat humanity as a single, undifferentiated mass dehumanize us, whether they are of the liberal (utilitarian) or illiberal (Marxist) variety.

I usually avoid policy in my faith and work writing, because these arguments are going to make some people uncomfortable. But UBI got some very uncritical advocacy at the Faith at Work Summit, and I think someone ought to make it clear there’s another side of the ledger.