When AI takes the jobs, won't Universal Basic Income — or its more ambitious cousin, Universal High Income — cushion the landing? It sounds intuitive: automation creates a vast surplus, so we redistribute it and everyone's fine. But ask a single question — who actually pays for it? — and the whole architecture starts to crack. Because the ultra-productive AI companies sit in San Francisco and Seattle, while the social cost of disruption lands on Slovakia, Eastern Europe, and most of the world outside the Anglo-American core. The tax base is in the wrong jurisdiction. And that's only one of the problems. The piece walks through the four proposed ways to fund UBI through the lens of Austrian economics, and shows why each one either fails or distorts — especially for small open economies.

https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2026/07/09/who-pays-for-ubi-when-ai-takes-the-jobs/