We're officially launching UBI

You don't need a bureaucracy to figure anything out. I have already done it. Everyone gets 2 L of bottled drinking water, 2200 kcal of food, a lockable room about 8'x10'x8.5', tap water, electricity, and Internet. The utility numbers mostly came from current usage statistics, the room size is based on solitary-confinement prison cells and self-storage units, and food and water based on the generally recognized dietary subsistence level of 2000 kcal/day and 1 mL/kcal rule of thumb for drinking water. An easy way to do it is to rely on the Geneva Conventions. If you cannot supply conditions sufficient for humane treatment of refugees and prisoners of war to your own citizens and residents, your numbers are wrong.

If you don't like the food you get with your ration, sell it. I'm sure there will be a service around to collect your unwanted UBI tangible goods and resell them to someone else in exchange for a cut of the proceeds, so you can get more, different, or better of something else that you do want. If you're a petite lady, you could likely trade in your 2200 kcal of basic UBI food for enough cash to buy 1800 kcal of better food. If you don't use all your free electricity, you could use it to mine bitcoins or purify copper electrode or recharge batteries. If you don't use your tap water, you could do someone else's laundry for money. But I picked the numbers to be in the "this kinda sucks" territory for a typical American. You'll probably always want more than you get, and for that, you still need to access the paid trade markets. And if for some reason you don't already want more than you get, that's what advertising is for.

The same calculation problem exists with the cash-only vision of UBI. Someone has to decide how much is enough. But then that number constantly changes as prices adjust to what people actually buy with their "enough".

The point of the tax thing is that the US has long been conditioned to be averse to communism in any recognizable form, and a less sizeable fraction is also averse to fascism. The fact remains that whatever you want to give away for free has to be produced first, and you can't guarantee that a for-profit business would make enough as long as it is possible to earn higher profit by producing less. If the government needs 750 Tcal of food to meet its UBI requirements, it can do one of 3 things: own farming capacity sufficient to produce it, order existing agribusiness to produce at least that amount and surrender it, or tax/print whatever it takes to buy that much on the open market. If communism is unacceptable, you have to do one of the other things, and the latter has the potential to destabilize your entire monetary system.

The story that comes after UBI and other forms of socialism is that humans are greedy and terrible to each other and institutionalized theft only makes greed and corruption worse.

Oh, and the funniest part is it will look initially like a good idea because it will probably improve the lives of those who are given money in small and rare cases, and the positive effect will dwindle the more universal it becomes.

A wiser move would be to teach others how to compete more effectively, but that doesn't sell as well as free money. The people doing these programs aren't stupid and I think it is our generation's "Let them eat cake!" moment. It's certainly good marketing to do so, and I think they believe it will truly make a difference.

One last thought on my silly little rant, "Do you think Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet should get UBI paid out to him?"

I am pretty lazy but I'm not lazy all the time. I don't think there exists such a classes of "lazy people" vs "non-lazy people". Laziness is a mood, a state. It can be altered by motivation. Income is one important motivator although arguably not the only one.

My point is, if we have welfare state with UBI, we will form in-groups and out-groups just as you describe. The taxes of all the "non-lazy” group will be unbearable high. You will hear choruses of complaints from them. They will resent those “lazy people”. Let’s add some other component like race, language or country of origin and you have society more divided than before. These are just a few of the unintended consequences I would see.

And 15k is hardly enough to sell this program politically. You can get that now on disability.

> You might quit your full time job, but you would probably find some part-time programming work you enjoyed to allow you to afford good snowboards

I can get by on a used snowboard. I could also steal on from one of those “non-lazy people” :)

How the heck does that work? Demanding bottled water as taxes is ridiculous. Either producing the bottles water is cheaper than paying equivalent taxes, and every company will do it or it is more expensive and nobody will do it.

Add that to the fact that you are trying to mandate the production of 4x the bottled water that the US currently uses per capita. This means there will be NO market for bottled water and thus you will have no idea the of the value of the bottled water that is being used to pay taxes.

Why mandate the production of 8x10x8.5 rooms for every citizen when most people won't want that? Why waste large amounts of energy and petrochemicals producing enough bottled water to hydrate the population? Why waste everyone's time by forcing them to engage in secondary markets to resell the goods they don't need?

> The same calculation problem exists with the cash-only vision of UBI. Someone has to decide how much is enough.

Yes, but this is a far simpler problem. We can use measures of inflation, economic growth and employment to determine the level of UBI that we can afford and that will optimize economic output.