Simon Sarris wrote:
Many articles explain the potential positives of implementing such a system, but none explain quite how we’ve made the leap from “we can’t pay for people’s retirement anymore” to “let’s give everyone money and see what happens.”
The collapse of Western socialism is to be precipitated by bankrupted pensions due to the ZIRP, ideological suicide, demographic suicide, rising interest rates, and the short-dollar vortex. My Steemit archives cover these in great detail.
Price inflation of basic necessities
Indeed, UBI is actually akin to a regressive tax because prices for basic necessities (and sinful non-discretionary addictions such as alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs) will experience significant inflation due to the UBI being not saved nor spent on high time preference investments nor discretionary goods.
Rent is currently eating the world. Rental income just hit an all-time high. If we adopt a UBI system and everyone is given a very predictable amount of money, it may be seen as a system easily gamed by landlords and possibly other producers of essentials.
A similar outcome occurred after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. when the unproductive poor were given title to lands and they proceeded to sell it to the rich in order to fund their low time preference priorities.
Removing all welfare to create UBI (to give everyone the same amount) is a de facto pay decrease to anyone with needs outside their control — such as diabetics, who need all the things you do to live, plus insulin.
From welfare to incentivizing failure for everyone. Socialism at its pinnacle.
There are many difficulties facing the poor in the U.S. and “not enough money” does not begin to capture the whole picture. The complexity of modern life is profound, and subsequent complications are often the most intense for the people who are the poorest and least able to understand that complexity. It is especially grim for those who have a hard time navigating financial instruments. People who are functionally illiterate, for example, could struggle. That amounts to about 11 million adults in the U.S. Even those with “below basic” literacy, which is roughly 30 million adults (14 percent of the U.S.), might find financial forms nearly impossible.
Eric S. Raymond writes about this in his recent blog The return of the servant problem:
Some people who seem dimly to apprehend what’s coming are talking up universal basic income as a solution. This is the long-term idiocy corresponding exactly to the short-term idiocy of the $15-an-hour-or-fight campaigners. UBI would be a trap, not a solution, and in any case has the usual problem of schemes that rely on other peoples’ money – as the demands of the clients increase you run out of it, and what then?
Btw, I refuted Eric’s fear mongering about high IQ splintering off from the rest of civilization, while also refuting the fear mongering about A.I.:
The generative essence of my objection to UBI is as I explain at the above link, that nature abhors highly ordered, top-down driven systems. Thus any such attempt to create such order will actually create more disorder. The general rule is it’s impossible to do just one thing. Thus nature will always force the free market of competing actors, and destroy any attempt to impart the same situation to all humans. Please read the above linked Quora post for a more detailed explanation, including some theoretical physics support for the concept.
As usual, I try to archive the linked webpages from my blogs at archive.org and/or archive.is.