The Critical Compass Podcast - August 29, 2025


＂Universal Basic Income is a very, very, VERY bad idea.＂ - Brett Oland, Bow Valley Credit Union CEO


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

155.52423

Word count

846

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Brett Schiller joins us to talk about the benefits of universal basic income (UBI) and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CDCs) and why they are a terrible idea.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 It seems like these tools, as you increase inflation, and you have these economic pressures,
00:00:07.980 it almost feels like, yeah, the solution is very obvious. We need more government,
00:00:14.000 and we need the government to provide everybody with a universal basic income. The solution's
00:00:19.860 always just, well, we've got to centralize things. There isn't enough of this, isn't enough of that.
00:00:24.540 We need somebody to take care of us. And it gets tricky to get out of this mindset because
00:00:31.760 when you decouple our sense of what money is actually worth from what it actually buys,
00:00:40.920 you are shifting people's time preference. So if people are unable to really view themselves in
00:00:47.600 a long term, they don't have the confidence 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from
00:00:52.860 now, what their life will be like, they're operating on a short time preference. And now
00:00:58.680 these instant solutions imposed by essential authority seem a lot more like, well, it's just
00:01:06.860 going to remove the hurt right now. And often these immediate solutions also have long-term
00:01:12.680 consequences that hurt more than whatever hurts right now.
00:01:17.660 Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm glad you're recording this because I'm going to go on the record and say
00:01:21.920 universal basic income is a very, very, very bad idea. But I honestly wouldn't blame people for
00:01:32.180 going on it. So if you're a single mother or a single father or something like that, and you're
00:01:38.140 struggling to put a roof over your head, put food on the table and make sure that you get the
00:01:43.860 electricity bill paid, you're desperate. And it's like, how are you supposed to look after that kid
00:01:50.380 and work three jobs just so you can pay your rent? Like it just doesn't work. And so really thinking
00:01:57.760 it through that you're right, that instant gratification is almost a necessity in that case.
00:02:03.480 And I think governments know that as well. And so they're basically right, walk right over here,
00:02:11.520 sign up for your universal basic income. By the way, we're going to put it to your central bank
00:02:16.440 digital currency account. And away we go.
00:02:20.700 You want to go on the record about that too?
00:02:22.800 Sure.
00:02:24.360 CBDCs? Good or bad idea, Brett?
00:02:26.860 Terrible, terrible idea. You know, I wrote a paper, I think it was in the spring of 2023.
00:02:35.240 The Bank of Canada came out with a survey that basically was asking questions like,
00:02:41.040 how would you use a central bank digital currency? Wouldn't it be fantastic if you could do this
00:02:45.660 really easy? And so I wrote this paper basically describing that you're marching down to a dystopian
00:02:53.240 nightmare. Thankfully, 90,000 Canadians responded and it was overwhelmingly bad towards a central 0.98
00:03:00.700 bank digital currency. And so the Bank of Canada has since put it on ice, but I've also read a few
00:03:06.940 papers of how it would be implemented. So the work hasn't stopped around a central bank digital
00:03:13.560 currency, but effectively it's on pause until on the service.
00:03:21.700 Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is, like I say, once people get desperate, it's I don't blame them.
00:03:29.820 That's another example. We've talked about it on the show before of how to another earlier point you
00:03:35.220 made about how, you know, this is not necessarily a left or right issue or a liberal conservative
00:03:38.940 issue, you know, we've been talking about. We use the example of when Trudeau was talking about
00:03:45.420 implementing a national school lunch program. And I don't know how far that went or if it's
00:03:51.020 implemented in any such way, but, you know, we describe it in the way of like, you know,
00:03:55.820 if you're a liberal in favor of a national school lunch program, conservatives are not
00:04:01.120 opposed to children eating lunch. You know, they just believe that there's a different
00:04:06.020 way to achieve that in that you, you know, you empower the parents to have more powerful
00:04:11.040 paychecks to, you know, to be able to buy their own kids lunches and not rely on a government
00:04:15.980 program that should they end up, should their children end up relying on it and the government
00:04:20.460 changes it in some way or it defunds it or it moves it to something else. Well, now what
00:04:25.200 are you going to do? Because you haven't planned, you know, it's just a different mindset
00:04:28.380 of where you believe the, um, the, uh, the, the source of the, of the, the goal should
00:04:34.540 come from, you know? Yeah. And, and it just, if, if you connect the dots to those, uh, next
00:04:40.840 levels, you come out with some pretty insidious outcomes, right? And it's like, is this kid
00:04:46.500 going to grow up thinking he's going to get his lunch paid for and delivered and plopped
00:04:50.740 on a tray everywhere he goes? And oh, where's my dinner and my breakfast for that matter,
00:04:55.880 you know? So where's my bugs? So it, it, it doesn't set a great precedent with, with anything.
00:05:05.120 And there's much better solutions that don't go down this dystopian nightmare pathway.
00:05:25.880 Thank you.