Why we should all have a basic income

> That's not really a fair response to the parent's comment, but I suppose the parent's comment was entirely charitable to the proposed hypothetical either.

That was the point.

> Would you rather pay qualified labor force participants to do labor/construction/civil engineering, or would you rather pay the same number of qualified participants to start high growth technology companies?

To which the answer is almost certainly, both. Because we need roads and infrastructure, but we also need a safety net, and they are not the same thing.

> I haven't actually done the math, but my intuition (which could be wrong!) is that it makes more sense to pay for people to e.g. fix America's insanely expensive and inefficient transportation system than to pay for them to sit in a garage and try to "innovate."

Literally starting a multibillion dollar company is obviously not the one most people are going to do. But a UBI also lets you quit your terrible job and still pay rent while attending community college, so you can get a better job tomorrow. Or use the safety net go to a new place where you're more likely to find better employment opportunities. Or start a normal small business that nobody ever expects to be Apple or Walmart but after a couple years will be able to pay you a middle class wage.

And the best part is that you have self-interested people figuring it out for themselves.

We've enjoyed great global PR, that's for sure. A good bunch of it undeserved.

There was a huge uproar about us legalizing pot. While you can now grow your own cannabis, the most important part: legal sale, is yet to be finalized despite plans starting 5 years ago without power changing hands.

There was another huge PR boost with the story about "Uruguay's poor president José Mujica". His administration ended as one of the worst ever experienced in the country's republican (as in Republic, not the US party) history. Corruption hit new peaks with public enterprise bleeding money into party officials' pockets left and right, something we're still paying via "tarifazos" (annual increases in costs of public infrastructure such as electricity, fuel and telecommunications despite their production costs going down).

Reality is that moving here can be suicide for many, as we're one of the most expensive countries to live in of Latin America (and the world) when you account for salaries. We have a growing culture of crime with a government that's disinterested in fixing it, and often tries to downplay it. Import tariffs are insane (usually 150%+ over retail price), and while citizens can make a few international orders under 200 USD without being taxed (used to be 5, then 4, now they just changed it to 3), it helps little and I expect they will scrap them altogether next year.

And oh my god the bureaucracy. It's the only thing more central to the Uruguayan identity than mate and football. The past couple of leftist administrations and this current one has been all about e-government, yet most interactions with the government will be in a crowded office after waiting an hour waiting for your number to come up on the screen. The little web infrastructure we have is inconsistent across public enterprises, is ridiculously insecure (national ISP, Antel, has a max password length of 8 alphanumeric characters; all sites are made in hacked together PHP and/or ASP.NET by FullStackOverflow programmers and one determined black hat could probably stop the country for a while in a boring weekend) and despite the government's interest in tracking all financial transactions, they're in no rush to implement online payment.

My SO starts studying engineering this year, and with me being a software developer (meaning remote is an option and there's offerings everywhere), our hope is that either a miracle happens or we fuck right off after she gets her diploma. We have a deeply ingrained cultural and political problem that will not allow the country to get out of this hole. But then again, Donald Trump is the leader of the free world; it's fair to expect the unexpectable when it comes to political change.

At any given time, some fraction of people are going to be burnouts. That's just a fact. I think they still deserve a baseline of wellbeing, without judgment. If they use it to better themselves, great. If not, oh well. But we spend so much time and effort trying to pick the winners rather than simply giving people a minimal foundation.

For those of us with work ethic (the vast majority of everyone, to varying extents), our extra effort will be rewarded by the market, if we do something that other people find valuable, or intrinsically, if we're just doing what we love.

Like being an absentee landlord. If owning and renting out property you do not live at and are only collecting passive income from was made illegal, way more people would be able to afford housing and it would solve a lot of equality issues. The whole practice is literal rent-seeking and only concentrates capital in the hands of a small minority.

I think UBI have a hard time gaining traction in the US. You're asking me to pay higher taxes to have an outcome where someone can actually do less than they currently do to contribute to society.

UBI is a very interesting concept, but in order to sell it you'd have to have a phased approach... one of the phases I think would have to include some sort of checks and balances.