“Just in case its intentions weren’t apparent, the government reaffirmed that the “primary goal of the basic income experiment is related to promoting employment.” As far as Centre was concerned, there was no reason to include low-earning adults already working or adults out of the labor force for reasons other than unemployment.

In December, the government’s UBI experiment was enacted into law. By early January — after Kela randomly selected two thousand people from its unemployment rolls and informed them of their mandatory participation in the experiment — the government had made its first monthly UBI payment.

And just like that, what started as the dream proposal of left-leaning wonks everywhere had, once filtered through the political process, mutated into the UBI-as-workhouse nightmare.”