Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

That's a downside if you're on it.

For everyone else who is working to pay for it, that's a rather big and fundamental upside.

UBI proponents have an unfortunate habit of engaging in a form of sophistry: by saying everyone gets UBI, they try to pretend the policy has no losers. They forget about the feelings and needs of the huge numbers of people who would be paying for UBI instead of receiving it, regardless of how the government chose to manipulatively print the numbers on your final paperwork. Almost all people, almost all of the time, will just be paying more in tax in order to make the UBI work, so it'll all cancel out for them. Money will come in via UBI and immediately go out again in the form of higher taxes. It must be so because the resources to pay for UBI don't come from nowhere. They come from people.

The reason welfare is means tested is because it's corrosive to society for workers to feel like they're being punished for working. People must work. That is fundamental. UBI makes the fraudulent claim that in theory nobody has to work, because everyone will receive UBI no matter what. This is obviously untrue and would be obviously untrue even to small children. What happens if everyone decides UBI is enough for them and just check out? Who works in the fields? Who builds the buildings? UBI has no answer for this. The dishonesty it would require from government and society would corrode away the pillars on which it sits.

> 3. Charity - let's say we actually give every person enough money for food, housing, and utilities. Some people will mess up.

This is why it should be a regular and frequent income, rather than giving people a lifetime's worth of money when they turn 18. As it is a regular income that resets every week/month/whatever, it's harder to mess up to that extent. Addiction or unwise Hire Purchase agreements might do it, but with the latter, lenders are likely to be even more aware of affordability than they currently are.

That aside, I would imagine that UBI could make people more charitable towards those who are thoroughly down on their luck. Partly because if someone is destitute under that system, something must be really wrong in their lives.

One problem with poverty at the moment is that it is so big. When problems are really big (see also climate change), people feel that effects of their own efforts would be trivial, and so are dissuaded from doing anything at all. If fewer people would be made destitute by bad decisions made out of desperation, donors might feel they can actually do something about it.

Another problem with poverty now is that there are so many diverse causes that it is much easier to aim relief efforts at the symptoms - e.g. shelters for the homeless, food for the hungry etc. If UBI covers that for most people, then we can put more effort into fixing the causes - abuse/addiction/mental illness/predatory lenders/discrimination etc. Thereby removing the need for charity.

> by automating consumption

It's called the subscription economy for a reason. Automated consumption exists and is constantly growing. The money spent on subscriptions grew in the US by >50% from 2010 to 2015.

The problems I see with UBI are: * It won't take into account the differences in the cost of living for different cities. * If it is paid based on the household size there'll be an incentive for lower income families have more kids in order to cash larger UBI checks.

Saving on bureaucracy is a frequently made argument that I have never seen supported by a quantitative analysis. Do they exist? Such a claim seems untrue on its face.

You can't eliminate the welfare bureaucracy with UBI because:

- You won't want to be giving free money to literally everyone, only people within your jurisdiction. So you still need to figure out who those people are and whether they're authorised to receive UBI.

- It will act as even more of a magnet for illegal immigration, so you'd still need to spend on border reinforcements. Same problem as they have now in Germany and Sweden: lots of people turned up who can't work and sit on welfare forever. If you don't stop this it's in reality a policy of giving out enough free money to live by western standards to the entire world, which isn't how it's being advertised.

- You still need to deduplicate everyone and ensure people can't register for UBI over and over.

- You need to stop people creating fake identities to receive UBI for people who don't exist.

- You still need to ensure UBI stops being paid when someone dies, even though families and friends have strong incentives to stop the state finding out about a death.

- You still need to decide how much the UBI is, how much it should change, and whether the amount should vary by location. What's plenty for someone in the countryside may be considered insufficient in the city.

- You still need to track where people live, the moment you give way on the amount being adjusted regionally, which you will because the sort of people who most enthusiastically support UBI are all-in on the type of "fairness" that invariably means not treating people the same. Or are they going to advocate for a single income tax rate across all earning bands as well?

- You will need a huge rise in taxes to pay for this, meaning tax evasion and avoidance will also go up quite dramatically. You'll need to bulk up the tax bureaucracies to handle this.

UBI is just a modern rebranding of what in the 20th century was called the socialist utopia. People tried it, it doesn't work. That was Russia at the start of the 1900s. UBI advocates today seem to have forgotten about all that, but they're re-treading intellectually dead ground.