Moving Forward on Basic Income

A loan shark can introduce a pipe wrench to your kneecap regardless of whether he can officially record a lien against your BI income or not.

My personal opinion is, like the ancestor post, that BI is unworkable as a cash-only benefit. People forget that money is an economic lubricant. It does not make the gears turn. Possession of cash is economic shorthand for being able to command the disposition of real goods and services.

Having cash is a symptom of providing value to the economy, not the cause of it.

If you take a big chunk of cash from rich folks, and dump it on poor folks, that does not alter the underlying structure of the economy. The real-world supply pipeline for bringing popcorn from a field in Indiana to a bodega in East L.A. remains the same size. You have to divert a lot of cash for a long time before anyone will even consider upping the bandwidth of that specific food channel. Until then, popcorn is just $N more expensive at the bodega.

You're not providing anyone with anything more than a temporary illusory benefit if you don't build some actual infrastructure. Giving cash for rent does little good, unless someone actually builds more houses and apartments as a means to getting some of that cash, or to more of it than their existing landlord competitors.

The same amount of cash, spent on eminent domain compensation and general building contractors, can directly generate a permanent reduction in the local monthly cost of housing, rather than as a potential incentive for someone out there to maybe try to get at it.

If you do not build the economic infrastructure required for the benefit to exist, the amount of cash you have to throw at the free market to provide it can increase without bound. The economy is currently structured to funnel property and luxuries towards the rich. Screwing on a bypass pipe from a rich person's consumption endpoint to somewhere further back in their existing cash flow structure does not accomplish much.

It's not just the US that is like this. Every country is.

Put another way: Things are the way they are for powerful reasons (which may or may not be justifiable). You can't just ignore these reasons when you create policy, otherwise those reasons will cause things to revert to the way they were before.

Proponents of basic income will have to overcome many peoples' moral intuitions about who deserves help, and who should have to work for a living.

If these moral intuitions remain the same, basic income won't be basic for long -- people will vote to give more money to the disabled, less money to felons, and so on. Should people receive basic income while incarcerated due to a criminal conviction? Someone will come along who suggests that members of certain racial groups should receive more money in the basic income program as a form of affirmative action, to compensate for past wrongs. Maybe people who choose to work should get more money under basic income, as an incentive for others to choose to work. Should people who inherit a lot of money have their basic income reduced?

I think it's pretty clear that the first time someone makes a change of the kind I listed above, the cat will be out of the bag, and basic income won't be "basic" income anymore. Then the argument that basic income should treat everyone the same will become useless to defend against further changes. You can't really preserve the purity of a policy design when the voters want to change it.

There is also the danger of everyone voting to increase their income, to the extent that the program runs out of money.

I think these moral intuitions can be changed, but only through a gradual phase-in of benefits over time. Of course, that's exactly what has been happening over the past century or so, and it's what led to the welfare systems we have today.

My only worry about that is the lack of (enforced) competition in the market to keep rent under control.

How do you 'enforce' competition? Build baby build, and you set how much to build by how much is being charged in an area.

People will complain about anything and everything. What is extremely valuable about UBI, though, is that unlike traditional welfare systems where those who squandered it are often just those who are also the most pitied, there is no ostracism for using a UBI and no social isolation for it because everyone gets it, and those who cannot manage their money have no one to blame but themselves.

Today, the poor are defensive of one another to some degree, defending their "way of life" even when it is exploitative of social safety nets because they have to fight for scraps and every step of the process in getting such benefits is humiliating. It should surprise no one that once people have it, they are happy to blow it and stick an effective fuck you back to the society that ostracizes and criticizes them.

Which is one of the pillars of utility in UBI. It is a panacea solution to negating hostile poverty based cultures like ghetto. There is no more war against the poor, or active emotional attack for needing help. Everyone gets the help, and there is no vector for abuse through it, so those who are aggressive towards it or squander it are no longer fighting the man but are just fools who deserve no pity.

> Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help.

How about if they get a grave disease and need urgent treatments and related resources for that? Is medical treatment supposed to be free in the scenario of BI as well ? Because, THAT, we know how well it works (free medical coverage) in several countries where it's already applied.