When I was a child, my family, who was engaged in a trucking business in Jeongseon's mine, collapsed with Jeongseon as the mine was closed. I was surprised a few days ago when I visited Jeongseon. Even though the population is disappearing, the local atmosphere has been very brightened by balanced social overhead capital and some basic income. The friend who was thought to have been exiled to the construction site of an isolated mountain valley looked very happy.
Column by Lee Hyeong-chun
June 2026
Lift the Ideological Curtain — Basic Income in the Age of AI
Robots took the jobs. Tax the robots to give them back.
1. Ideology Is a Language of the Past
Whenever the basic income debate begins in Korea, ideology is the first weapon drawn. 'Isn't this socialism?' 'Aren't you just handing out money?' These attacks are not arguments — they are reflexes. Decades of ideological conditioning firing automatically.
Ideology is, at its core, a language born from past conflicts. Capitalism was forged in the production relations of the Industrial Revolution; socialism emerged as a reaction to 19th-century labor exploitation. In Korea, the left-right divide carries an additional layer — the trauma of national division, the Cold War, and anticommunism. Ideology here is doubly entangled.
What is striking about basic income is that it is simultaneously supported and rejected by both left and right. The left champions it as poverty relief and labor empowerment, then turns against it as a Trojan horse for dismantling existing welfare. The right invokes Milton Friedman's negative income tax, then recoils at its threat to the work ethic. This pattern reveals one thing: basic income was born precisely at the point where ideology has no answer.
2. AI Turns Fractures Into Collapse
Traditional unemployment was cyclical and frictional. When the economy recovered, jobs came back. But the unemployment created by AI and robots is structural and permanent. Truck drivers, call center workers, accountants, radiologists — their jobs will not return when growth picks up.
Capital owns the AI. Labor is replaced by it. Productivity explodes, but the fruits flow to a tiny minority. This is where ideology's fractures deepen into something more serious.
The legitimacy claim of capitalism — that you earn what you work for — requires that the opportunity to work exists. If AI structurally eliminates that opportunity, the link between labor and distribution breaks entirely.
This is an unprecedented challenge for both left and right. The world changes; ideological language does not. AI and robotics advance exponentially; human institutions and ideologies move linearly, or not at all. As this gap widens, institutions fail to track reality, and reality moves ahead without them.
3. The Public Has Already Lived It
Korea's COVID-19 emergency relief payments inadvertently ran the basic income experiment. When the payments went out, consumption revived immediately. Small business revenues climbed. Even parts of the business community quietly acknowledged it: when people's pockets are empty, corporate revenues follow.
In a framing battle, lived experience beats logic. No matter how sophisticated the economic counterargument, the memory of ordering chicken with relief money — and watching that restaurant survive — cannot be erased. An entire generation of Koreans has now experienced a primitive form of basic income in their own bodies.
The business community's reluctance is not really about basic income itself. Basic income boosts consumption, which is good for business. The real problem is the funding source. If the revenue comes from a robot tax, the entities paying that tax are the very corporations that invested in automation. But the business sector is not monolithic. Consumer goods and retail companies benefit from higher demand; only the AI-heavy conglomerates resist the robot tax. That internal fracture is the strategic opening.
4. Rural Korea Is Already Proving It
While the theory wars rage, reality has moved first. Korea's rural areas have been quietly running basic income pilots — not for ideological reasons, but for survival: to reverse population collapse.
In 2025, the Ministry of Agriculture selected ten depopulating rural counties for a basic income pilot program: Yeoncheon in Gyeonggi, Jeongseon in Gangwon, Cheongyang in South Chungcheong, Sunchang and Jangsu in North Jeolla, Gokseong and Sinan in South Jeolla, Okcheon in North Chungcheong, Yeongyang in North Gyeongsang, and Namhae in South Gyeongsang. Each resident receives 150,000 won per month in local currency vouchers through 2027. Sinan County tops this up with its own funds, reaching 200,000 won.
The results were immediate. In Sinan, the population jumped by 1,020 in a single month after the program was announced. Cheongyang and Okcheon reversed years of decline, each gaining around 1,000 residents. Seven counties that recorded net outflows in 2024 flipped to net inflows in 2025. People moved toward the money.
Where money flows, people gather. Where people gather, communities revive. This is not ideology. It is gravity.
The requirement to spend the vouchers only at local small businesses and public facilities reveals another dimension of basic income's potential. The money does not leak out of the region — it circulates among local merchants and the local economy. A basic income engineered for economic recycling.
Challenges remain. Fraudulent registrations by those seeking benefits, and long-term fiscal sustainability, are legitimate concerns. Extending the program to all 69 depopulating counties would cost roughly 4.9 trillion won annually; covering all rural Koreans, 6 trillion won. But these numbers describe a design problem, not a barrier. A robot tax — a new and currently untapped revenue source — exists precisely to fill this gap.
5. From Ideology to Survival — The Frame Shift
Korea's rural basic income succeeded by reframing the debate around 'population collapse' rather than ideology. Who would argue in favor of rural extinction? That is the power of a well-chosen frame.
Basic income in the AI era demands the same move: speak the language of survival, not ideology. The mass unemployment AI and robots will generate is no different in kind from rural depopulation. It is urban industrial extinction — the disappearance of truck drivers, call centers, middle-office workers.
Fear does not discriminate by ideology. In the face of losing one's livelihood, the labels 'left' and 'right' dissolve. When the middle class sees itself as a victim, political pressure changes in quality, not just quantity. Korean history repeatedly shows that when the middle class feels threatened, politics moves.
It is the duty of the state to build the levee before the flood arrives. Prevention is cheaper than disaster response. Even conservatives accept this logic.
6. Those Who Took the Gains Must Bear the Costs
The logic of the robot tax is simple arithmetic. Robots replace human labor. The taxes those humans would have paid disappear. Tax the owners of the robots instead. Convert the revenue into basic income. This is not ideology. It is arithmetic.
As Korea's rural basic income pilots demonstrate, basic income is not merely welfare. It attracts people, generates consumption, and revives communities. The same principle applies to cities and industries in the AI age. The demand basic income creates becomes the revenue that sustains businesses. The business community acknowledged this themselves.
AI and robots cannot be stopped. But protecting citizens from their shock is the obligation of the state. Tax the robots for the jobs they took, and return that revenue to the people they displaced. This is not ideology. It is survival.
The world is changing. It is time to lift the ideological curtain.
— Lee Hyeong-chun
