Good points.
> if you're talking about their freedom to do something...if you're talking about society in general it seems obvious that certain behaviors are bad and should be discouraged
Okay. So you want to discourage people buying cheetos and drugs. That's fine. I agree that they can both be unhealthy. What's a good way to discourage the purchase of these items?
Furthermore, pretty much any activity choose to spend your time doing can fall somewhere on the continuum of worthwhileness. And different activities are worthwhile to different extents to different people. But to what extent should we be judging people's activities and disallowing certain activities? Should it extend into how they spend their money? Does it make sense for these restrictions only to apply to poor people? Why? I'm not saying there's an easy answer here. I agree with you that some people need help making the right decisions sometimes and I agree with you that we need laws to protect people.
> but if you're going to tax me, and then give this money away to people it seems reasonable that i should have at least some say in what it's spent on
I haven't said anything about taxing you. I'm not talking about taking your money and giving it to someone else. I understand that some basic income proponents think that it has to be "funded" through tax revenue, but I feel that it's a mistake to frame things in this way. Increasing taxes doesn't increase the level of basic income we can afford.
That being said, the purpose of the government is to represent the collective interests of the people, so you absolutely should have a say in how the government spends their money (it's not your money). And if you have strong feelings about how certain types of spending will help or hurt people, then you're obviously free to voice those concerns.
But I don't see how it hurts people to give them money they can spend on anything they choose. And if we really want to deter people from buying drugs and cheetos, I'm not sure that putting absolute conditions on how poor individuals spend their income is an optimal way to achieve that.
> which just gets us back to the same discussions about what UBI evolves into and the kind of culture changes required for it to work (if it's even possible for it to work...that is not a certainty).
You've been alluding to a required culture change. What would that entail, specifically?
> This "if you give the money they'll spend it in your economy" thing is I think by no means clear. The largest cash source in Mexico is remittance payments from the US.
Well, some of the basic income will get spent in our economy. To the extent that some of it goes straight to Mexico never to return, it's roughly the equivalent of the government spending money by tossing it down a hole. That portion of the spending has no effect on our economy. This means that we can increase the amount of the basic income even further because our economy has left over capacity to absorb more spending.
> The reason I brought up the "global citizen" model is because there's a lack of skepticism and critical analysis on it and people make blanket statements like "the first country to give everyone in the world money" are actually taken seriously.
Fair enough. I am often not taken seriously when I say things like that. But that doesn't mean I haven't thought about it thoroughly. So thanks for taking me seriously and asking me questions to try to understand where I'm coming from.