Governments should give each citizen a basic income

Introduction: It has been argued that, in order for citizens to be able to maintain an acceptable standard of living in a country, the government should institute a policy of payments to them regardless of their employment status. While such an idea may be appealing in principle, certain social and economic realities make it infeasible at the present time. 

P1: Foremost among the counterarguments to such schemes is that of inflation. If the government were to set up such a system, it would need to print more money and the prices of goods and services would rise to meet this, rendering any theoretical benefits unworkable. Moreover, in economic terms, countries are not uniform in the distribution of their economic production and so providing the same amount of money to everyone regardless of the reality of their context might adversely affect the balance of the local economy. 

P2: Similarly, such a system is more likely to reinforce and perpetuate social inequalities in a given area. If middle-class people - who typically have a larger amount of financial knowledge and access to resources relative to working-class people - are given a similar amount of money, they will be better able to effectively exploit this. By contrast, poorer people are more likely to use this money to meet basic survival needs. This would be the case, particularly if the previously mentioned currency inflation occurred. 

Conclusion: In summary, due to the aforementioned economic and social reasons connected to inflation and social inequality, systems which are designed to provide people with a baseline income (while well-intentioned) are likely to create new problems or make existing ones worse. With this in mind, it seems appropriate to completely disagree with their implementation. 

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