Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore. Except that all of those things are the exact opposite of what…
Instead of basic income wouldn't it make sense to have some sort of basic "lifestyle" provided by government. Out of the box you get a very small government built apartment (no rent or utility bills, all part of the package), vouchers for 3 meals per day (government run canteens in these government apartment buildings), free healthcare and education also provided by the government. So you would get all these basic ne…
The government is bad at operating a business. They aren't subject to competition. If they do something poorly they don't lose business so they just keep doing it poorly. There is no reason to ever have the government build housing or grow food instead of just giving people money to buy housing or food.
Government products also have another flaw. If the government provides $500 worth of free government housing, and you have $200, there is no way for you to turn that into $700 worth of housing. Improving your housing by $200 costs you $700. It's a poverty trap.
And allocating money to specific things has the same problems. Governments are bad at allocating things. Give someone a housing voucher and they'll buy housing, even if they don't need housing as much as they need something else. Many people would be better off to e.g. live with relatives and use the same money to pay for car insurance so they can drive to work. With a housing voucher they can't do that, so instead they waste the government's money on unneeded housing. And in the process raise both taxes and housing costs for everyone else.
Moreover, in any situation where that isn't the case, vouchers for necessities are equivalent to cash regardless. If you're buying $200 worth of food anyway, a $100 food voucher is the same as $100 in cash, because you use the food voucher for food and use the $100 you would have spent on food to buy whatever you want.
Which means that vouchers require a voucher checking bureaucracy that spends resources doing something which is completely redundant in every case that it isn't actively harmful.
It's far more efficient to just give people cash and let them figure it out for themselves.