Results: Finland’s Basic Income Experiment Help Us Build the Post-Pandemic World

Are you asking how it happened in Finland, or how it would happen in a theoretical future world?

Start my taxing the rich. Also consider the money saved from reduced bureaucracy around unemployment benefits.

The money spent on corporate bailouts the past few months would probably be enough to provide UBI for quite a long time.

I can't argue for oil, but for food, unless everyone agrees to eat only processed food or cook by themselves, it's still going to see some inflation.

Agreed, this kind of experiment is flawed in many ways.

For me the argument for UBI is very simple: it's a simpler version of the status quo in most countries in terms of administrative overhead that offers more freedom to individuals. Those are two good things IMHO.

It's precisely for this reason that it's controversial because conservatives on both side of the political spectrum consider the notion that people should do work (no matter how meaningless) part of their core values.

Communism was all about workers and probably the closest we ever got to having UBI in some countries. Work ethos is very much a core value. So the notion of rewarding people for not working is controversial in communist circles. Most would consider communism a failed experiment from an economic point of view because it also included notions of central planning, equally (low) wages for everyone, and little differentiation in terms of skills & value of those skills. I.e. equating the two would be a mistake.

Fiscal conservatives on the other hand argue for a small state and are perpetually worried about "who is paying for this".

The argument for UBI and against both points of view is that we already have it in the sense that most countries provide healthcare, housing, foodstamps, and other benefits for basically everyone, including the homeless people, the elderly, children, and many others that in any case are not part of the working population. Also, in many countries, the working population is shrinking in the sense that unemployment statistics exclude whole parts of the population that are effectively not considered to be working and are therefore not actually unemployed (children, students, married women looking after children, medically disabled people, retired people, long term out of job people, the homeless, etc.). We take care of all these people already and that costs money. It actually is a rather large part of the current budget of whatever country you are in. Where these programs fall short, inevitably it causes a lot of problems and misery. Also the collective programs we have for doing this are a combination of very expensive and inefficient. E.g. some countries spent more on unemployment bureaucracy and programs than on the actual benefits.

UBI is about acknowledging & formalizing the status quo that no matter what, you will have the means to take care of yourself at some minimum definable level. IMHO, it has the potential to vastly simplify things in the sense that it would remove the need for minimum wage, state pensions, etc. and the associated bureaucracy. So there's an upside in terms of less administrative overhead and vastly less complexity & risk for employers & citizens.

The existing system of benefits could be redefined on top of a UBI and would likely get a more optional character. To the point where you could privatize this; which I imagine might be a popular topic in the US and other places with a strong libertarian minded population.

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My summary is that if we somehow captured the entire wealth of the wealthiest three individuals, we could double the wealth of everyone in the bottom 50%.