Following in the footsteps of Seattle and Los Angeles, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay has announced support for a $15 an hour minimum wage in his city. As the wider “Fight for 15” gains more steam than many of its critics expected, even some commentators sympathetic to minimum wage policies are expressing doubts about the wisdom of this move.

A high minimum wage has the potential to lead to larger unemployment, with businesses financially unable to employ workers under the legal mandate. If I were making $9 an hour, I certainly wouldn’t complain about a $6 raise; however, I might have reason to be upset if my employer decided to let me go rather than pay the higher wage.

What if, instead of requiring employers to provide a particular minimum nominal sum, the government provided every citizen with an income sufficient to cover the basic necessities? Employers would be allowed to pay workers whatever they choose, but any earned income would supplement a government-provided Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI). The GBI would not provide for an extravagant lifestyle, but should allow for the minimum requirements of shelter, food and clothing.

The guaranteed basic income has several economic advantages over the minimum wage. A GBI isn’t a disincentive for firms to hire more workers, as the minimum wage is, at least at some levels. And it would raise the welfare of all impoverished Americans, rather than just those who are employed. More broadly, it allows for a slimmed-down and simpler approach t0 helping the poor.

Many think the idea sounds fanciful and that a higher minimum wage is more pragmatic. However, the idea of the GBI has wider appeal than one might expect. Noted conservative economist, Milton Friedman, still revered by many on the right, endorsed a policy in his lifetime called the Negative Income Tax, a variant of the GBI:

This idea attracts many strange bedfellows, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bruce Bartlett, and President Nixon. Surprisingly, even some proposals by GOP presidential candidates bear a striking resemblance to a GBI, and could serve as a groundwork for more substantial programs down the line. Though a straightforward GBI is not currently on the table, it may be closer than we think.

The most appealing feature of the GBI is that it helps those who are most burdened by the necessity of work, from a single mother working three jobs to a student working the graveyard shift to make rent. The exact amount provided annually to each citizen is open to debate (some have proposed $10,000 total annually for an adult), but the figure should strike the balance between providing a minimum level of sustenance and not discouraging too much of a disincentive for labor.

Some worry that the negative impacts on labor participation will inevitably be too much, as some early experiments with similar programs did find marginal decreases in labor. The extent of these decreases has likely been exaggerated and is open to dispute, but some decrease in the total hours people work, and reduction in certain types of work, is probably desirable. Many people work very hard in grueling jobs just because they feel they have to to make ends meet. It’s better that they not feel forced to work in this way, even if this results in a somewhat lower GDP.

Even this might be too pessimistic. Extra financial security might lead to economic advantages all around, as workers feel more comfortable to search for work they are truly good at and invested in, or take time off to acquire more skills.

With a GBI, businesses wouldn’t necessarily start out with the upper hand in negotiations with workers. Since any worker wouldn’t need a job to survive, they would only work if an employer makes it enticing enough. Automation could take over many of the jobs that are broadly unappealing.

If we institute a GBI, increasing automation becomes much less threatening. With only minimum wage laws to protect the working class, we risk giving jobs over to robots. But the GBI puts choice into the hands of the worker–only jobs that no one would want to do unless they were desperate would be threatened with automation, and we should be happy to see those jobs disappear anyway.

A GBI would have additional advantages. Instead of giving the poor money for food, or different forms of housing assistance, they would receive cash and make their own choices about how to spend it. This has the benefit of being a much simpler system to administer, while also giving greater respect to the autonomy of the poor.

This doesn’t mean, as some conservatives who embrace this idea would like, that we would get rid of all other social programs. The government has a valuable role to play in education and health care in particular, and I hope to see both of these sectors of the government expanded in the future. But in general, a more efficient and effective distribution of government funds would mean more resources could go to those who need them.

Why hasn’t this idea caught on? That’s anyone’s guess. Every now and then this topic comes up in the press, and pundits congratulate themselves for discussing it intelligently, and everyday politics continues as usual. It’s time for us to start taking the idea very seriously.

Photo Credit: Pictures of Money via Flickr[edited]