The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

There's an agency problem when one actor is making purchasing decisions on behalf of others without any necessary alignment of interests, which, absent other controls (which themselves have a not-insignificant cost, both in terms of administration and in terms of potentially distorting results in other ways), those decisions end up reflecting interests of the decision-maker rather than the nominal beneficiaries -- this is the problem that gives us, on the one hand, outright corruption in government purchasing when there aren't adequate controls, and, where controls are adopted to fight that, frequenly byzantine bureaucratic rules nominally designed to prevent corruption that have the side effects of making both sides of government contracting more costly in administrative terms and effectively restricting government contracting to those entities that specialized in navigating those rules -- restricting competition and decreasing efficiency.

With the central welfare authority deciding what people need, where to source it from, and in what quantities, there are lots of points where either corruption opportunities or expensive corruption controls are necessary; when the only administrative determination that needs to be made is whether straightforward class membership like "citizenship", etc., are met, the number of points at which you either pay the cost of corruption or corruption controls is reduced.

> Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets?

IMO, the goal of BI is, on the theoretical side, to address systematic distributional inequities in capitalist markets, and, on the pragmatic side, to provide a glide-path out of an economy oriented around wage labor as the primary source of individual support as automation and other changes render that increasing less viable as a basis for the economy with broad prosperity.

Enabling people to avoid starving in the streets is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for that.

Are you against the accumulation of capital or do you feel it should have an upper limit? IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society and money saved is debt that hasn't been called in, whether inherited or earned. If society has seen vast productivity gains in the interim then of course money earned by mowing someones lawn a 100 years ago would go a lot further today.

I don't see the accumulation or ownership of capital as fundamental structural inequity

Neither.

> IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society

Obviously, its a way to measure that. I specifically identified how its a problematic way to measure that -- providing equal utility to someone with greater wealth provides greater reward, which means that those who have accumulated wealth -- often aided by inheritance and circumstance of birth -- are most able to redirect society to serve their utility, including reshaping it to direct future wealth to themselves and their descendants. Left unchecked, this tends to make money, overtime, a worse and worse representation of social value provided by the person holding it, and the market value of exchanges a worse and worse measure of the social value of the exchange.

That's not to say that wealth accumulation should not be permitted nor that it should have a fixed upper limit, because those have their own problems.

But it does need to be recognized as a distortion and balanced. and that's increasingly more true the more the rewards of the economy, before considering regulatory interventions, go to capital rather than labor.