Universal Basic Income is Stockholm Syndrome
Discussion
The proposals they are calling UBI are not even close. The whole point of UBI is that there are NO other govt social programs. NADA. No Social Security. No Medicaid. No food stamps. No subsidized housing. So in the US, you would take the ~$1.5T spent on social programs each year, divide it between ALL citizens (including babies - and maybe even fetuses), rich and poor, Bill Gates and the drunk in the ditch. That comes to about $5000 each.
Of course most people don't really need an extra $5K a yr, and Bill Gates certainly doesn't. The reason for distributing to EVERYONE is to avoid strings attached via qualifications. There is no penalty for getting an entry level job (as there is with welfare). This also minimizes the bureaucracy needed for the distribution. Basically, just send a check to every SSN for instance (not that I endorse SSN).
Before Biden, I could live on $5K/yr as a single, study in the library, scrounge computers from the dump to repair (which I do anyway), eat the Walmart rotissiere chicken + pack of greens for $5 each day (illustration only - change it up of course). Wear pants until they stand up in the corner, then get a new pair at the thrift. Sleep on the mulch bed at the mall (popular actually) - it is (or was) entirely doable.
From that basic subsistence, I could work on employment, write novels, start a micro-business, or otherwise be useful or at least amuse myself. The fear of statists is that some recipients of UBI might buy drugs and kill themselves - hence all the strings attached with food stamps, etc. True enough, but people manage to buy drugs/liquor anyway. A stupid objection.
There has always been a form of UBI - subsistence farming. Unlike UBI, this was hard physical work. But you could (and people did) live on it. The US has put many rules in the way of that, but there were a few dozen subsistence people living in parks that I knew about for the last 40 years - hunting, fishing, gathering, small plantings. Unlike tourists, they did not litter (nothing to litter with) - but the park rangers were always trying to evict them for some reason (don't want to give people ideas, I guess).
When employers are abusive to the extreme, subsistence farming has been the historical fallback. The problem with industrialization was that city dwellers had no such fallback - horrendous abuse must be endured, the only alternative was starvation. An English worker fleeing a city would find all the land owned by aristocrats, and any attempt to hunt/fish/gather would be punished as "poaching". This very real injustice is what gave rise to the very bad solutions of socialism and Marxism. G. K. Chesterton has many more insights in "Eugenics and Other Evils".
UBI is a libertarian socialist idea to replace subsistence farming in an industrialized world.
Of course, the actual programs called "UBI" being proposed are totally different. They are yet another redistribution of wealth on top of all the garbage already in place. Hence I do not support them at all. But I would support a real UBI that *replaces* existing programs at the same dollar amount. Compromise would be in not replacing everything. Maybe leave SS but replace food stamps with a UBI for example.
I am against every situation where property is taken by force from the one who earned it and given to someone else, but being more pragmatic and understanding, that for the foreseeable future, there will be handouts, I would argue that getting rid of a every single government handout program and going to a very low paying UBI would be an improvement. It would get rid of the majority of government employees, reducing cost and people who benefit for voting for bigger government. It would be fair. Everyone would receive the same benefit. It would be easier to eliminate fraud. Of course this only works if the level of UBI meets the most basic needs, but makes the receiver very uncomfortable. If people are given enough to be comfortable, there will be little motivation to work. I agree with Benjamin Franklin who said (paraphrase), "The best thing we can do for the poor is to make them uncomfortable in their poverty."
Realistically, the chances of eliminating all other handouts (especially long term) and keeping UBI low are unlikely, but that would be the best option, assuming there has to be redistribution.
I will reiterate, that I don't want UBI or any redistribution scheme, but I try to be realistic about the near term while working towards long term freedom.
What LibertyGal said, but I'd like to underline:
- What a toxic, self-perpetuating, power-tripping clique the social welfare bureaucracy is
- How much money they waste / pay to middlemen/lawyers instead of intended recipients.
- How they use their "discretion" to exclude unfashionable and disfavoured demographics, and extract "submission displays" to themselves / to Wokeness from the rest.
UBI puts the social welfare bureaucrats ALL out of work. Which is why UBI won't happen.
But, tactically, publicly supporting UBI "wedges" Left Establishment politicians hard at their weakest point - they expect votes from both the bureaucracy/middlemen and the poor, and those two hate each other. Offer the poor a future without the bureaucrats, and the Left Establishment coalition blows apart.
In a system where #UBI is possible, it’s unrealistic to expect that any other handouts can be stopped.
As implied, if that were implemented, that would take the power and source of comfortable livelihood from too many “stakeholders” in the status quo.
That "getting rid of existing programs" is indeed the stumbling block. As mentioned in my lengthy post, I would consider converting individual govt handouts to UBI as progress (e.g. Food Stamps). But govt has tricky ways to pretend they have removed a program - but really just hidden it.
I find it unlikely they will remove all of the other programs (or maybe they do it briefly and start adding them back). I also find it unlikely they would make UBI low enough to be truly painful. Without doing both, it is just adding to the problem.