South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism named an basic income for artists among six key tasks in its second-half business report, delivered at a briefing hosted by President Lee Jae-myung, and plans to have a model established by the end of this year.
Inspired by Ireland’s successful trial and implementation, the stated purpose is to support a stable creative environment for artists as the foundation of a culturally powerful nation.
The move lands as AI takes over graphic design, advertising, and other arts-adjacent work that has historically paid artists’ bills — the same pressure the Creatives Rebuild New York evaluation flagged earlier this year.
How the queen of country music gave unconditional cash to wildfire survivors — and proved basic income works.
You’ve probably already seen the tributes pouring in, the greatest hits, the rhinestones, the Jolene memes, the Whitney Houston story, and all of that is real, and all of it matters. But I want to honor her by writing about something Dolly did that most people still don’t fully appreciate, something that should reshape how we think about helping people in their greatest time of need.She gave people money. Unconditionally. No bureaucrats deciding what they were allowed to spend it on. No means-testing. No paternalism. Just cash, because she trusted that they knew their own lives better than anyone else.“I always count my blessings more than I count my money,” she once said. “I don’t work for money, never did.” But she understood what money means to people who don’t have enough of it. She understood that when everything you own has burned to the ground, the last thing you need is someone deciding for you what help looks like. What you need is the freedom to decide for yourself. You need money.
Imagine two plots of land in the heart of a big city, side by side, the exact same size. On one stands a gleaming fifty-story tower full of offices and apartments and shops. On the other sits a zero-story parking lot.
Now ask yourself: which owner pays more in taxes?
The tower owner does. We tax the building, so the more you build, the more you owe. The parking lot owner, who built almost nothing, pays almost nothing, even though the dirt beneath that asphalt is worth a fortune precisely because it sits in the middle of a thriving city that everyone else built up around it. So the parking lot just sits there. Year after year. The owner pays their small tax, and watches the land’s value climb—value they did nothing to create, mind you—waiting to sell for a huge windfall.
I think that’s pretty perverse, and a land value tax (LVT) is built to fix it.
A 1.5% annual stock dilution tax on corporations with revenue over $100M would raise over $1.4 trillion a year — enough to send every American about $365 a month, automatically.
Corporations issue new stock all the time — to raise cash, to pay executives, to swallow up other companies. So here’s a question: what if they had to issue a little new stock to the rest of us, too? I call it a stock dilution tax, and I think it’s the cleanest way to pay for a universal basic income (UBI) with a wealth tax. Make every large corporation mint 1.5% in fresh shares each year, sell them off slowly, and hand the proceeds to every American — roughly $365 a month, with no new bureaucracy and nowhere for the wealthy to hide from it.
Imagine a room with a thousand people. You know that 999 of them need something to survive, and one of them doesn’t. You have two options. Option one: give the same thing to all 1,000 people, and when they leave through a door where everyone’s income is already being checked, take a bit more from the one person who didn’t need it. Option two: before giving anything to anyone, set up an additional checkpoint inside the room, hire people to run it, create paperwork, establish eligibility rules, and test all 1,000 people — knowing that the test will incorrectly fail dozens if not hundreds of people who actually need help — all to avoid giving something to one person for whom the amount is a rounding error.
That is the choice between universal basic income and means-tested anything. When you frame it honestly, the answer is obvious. But we don’t frame it honestly. We frame it as responsible budgeting versus reckless spending. We frame it as helping the deserving versus subsidizing the rich. We frame it in ways that serve the interests of the people who benefit most from the means-tested version. And those people, as I’ll explain, are not the poor.
