There is no need to overcomplicate this, as the champions of welfare statism make the same errors over and over again no matter what their specific proposal is. The principle of the state taking care of basic needs, in whatever guise it takes, is a disaster.
To optimize one's pursuit of happiness, an adult human being must provide for one's own basic needs, not become a dependent client of someone else. A mere promise by the state is no substitute for having a sense of self-sufficiency that arises from the knowledge that one is sufficiently competent to provide the basics for oneself (and for one's kids, etc.). Adults need their personal autonomy and personal competency just as much as they need food, water, shelter, or emergency medical care. The idea that the state has to make sure that everyone is taken care of is equivalent to saying that everyone ought to be treated like a child, and saying that the state is everyone's loving parent (neither of which aligns with certain obvious psychological facts about human nature).
There is also the economic problem that people who have an ironclad promise that their basic needs will always be taken care of don't feel any particular urgency about taking responsibility for saving for the future. Most academic economists have a hard time grasping this problem because they usually equate growth with private investment spending (which of course can be artificially boosted by money creation, etc.), without taking into account the necessity of having to also restrain present consumption in order to redirect labor and resources into making the structure of production more capital intensive and thus raising the future productivity of labor and resources.
Once it is understood that the location of the boundary of the "production-possibility frontier" is a function of how much time is available for transforming inputs into outputs as well as a function of production technologies, human capital, etc., then one can begin to grasp how seriously labor productivity and incomes are impaired by shifting the responsibility for meeting future needs from private individuals to the state, and why subsidizing the advance of technology, education, etc. can't offset a welfarism-induced paralysis of thrift.
The UBI proposal is not any fundamentally different from the existing Social Security/Medicare racket in this respect, and the empirical facts are that since Medicare was passed in the mid-1960s, personal savings rates and the share of GDP devoted to private investment have plunged. Indeed, the growth of government's share of GDP over this period (almost entirely driven by Social Security and Medicare, as the Pentagon's share has shrunk considerably) has come entirely at the expense of private investment, not at the expense of private consumption. Reductions in tax rates on investment income (the perennial favorite of Republicans) and the ever-popular Federal Reserve monetary stimulus with artificially low interest rates (which was institutionalized when the dollar was cut off from gold in 1971) haven't offset such spendthrift tendencies. If you want to understand why the U.S., Europe, and Japan are falling behind countries like China, you only have to look to the role that welfare statism has played over the past half century in disincentivizing thrift and deindustrializing their respective economies. UBI, of course, does nothing to alter this situation.
I believe the old, boring earned income tax credit is the least bad of our alternatives if we want a safety net. It (mostly) preserves work incentives, helps those most deserving and in need, helps make sure kids are raised in households with adequate means to care for them, and mostly avoids creating an entitlement mentality.
Money for nothing is almost always a bad idea, unless you have someone so disabled they really can't contribute anything. It offends a reasonable sense of fairness among those working and very often destroys the character and lives of those who receive it as well as their children, who don't learn that you need to work to live.
Three checks amounting to little more than $3,000 dollars for most is not the same as UBI. Sorry, try harder. And the relief was not a debacle except for the overly exuberant segment of our population who spent it on rims and sneakers among other things. (See Steve Sailer for more). Most people used the money for rent, food, to pay off loans, etc.
Humans will always have intrinsic motivation to do things they want. For other stuff we automate. It's our destiny to create abundance, and within that framework, markets make no sense. It's that simple. UBI is just a catalyst to arrive to that state of things.
There is no need to overcomplicate this, as the champions of welfare statism make the same errors over and over again no matter what their specific proposal is. The principle of the state taking care of basic needs, in whatever guise it takes, is a disaster.
To optimize one's pursuit of happiness, an adult human being must provide for one's own basic needs, not become a dependent client of someone else. A mere promise by the state is no substitute for having a sense of self-sufficiency that arises from the knowledge that one is sufficiently competent to provide the basics for oneself (and for one's kids, etc.). Adults need their personal autonomy and personal competency just as much as they need food, water, shelter, or emergency medical care. The idea that the state has to make sure that everyone is taken care of is equivalent to saying that everyone ought to be treated like a child, and saying that the state is everyone's loving parent (neither of which aligns with certain obvious psychological facts about human nature).
There is also the economic problem that people who have an ironclad promise that their basic needs will always be taken care of don't feel any particular urgency about taking responsibility for saving for the future. Most academic economists have a hard time grasping this problem because they usually equate growth with private investment spending (which of course can be artificially boosted by money creation, etc.), without taking into account the necessity of having to also restrain present consumption in order to redirect labor and resources into making the structure of production more capital intensive and thus raising the future productivity of labor and resources.
Once it is understood that the location of the boundary of the "production-possibility frontier" is a function of how much time is available for transforming inputs into outputs as well as a function of production technologies, human capital, etc., then one can begin to grasp how seriously labor productivity and incomes are impaired by shifting the responsibility for meeting future needs from private individuals to the state, and why subsidizing the advance of technology, education, etc. can't offset a welfarism-induced paralysis of thrift.
The UBI proposal is not any fundamentally different from the existing Social Security/Medicare racket in this respect, and the empirical facts are that since Medicare was passed in the mid-1960s, personal savings rates and the share of GDP devoted to private investment have plunged. Indeed, the growth of government's share of GDP over this period (almost entirely driven by Social Security and Medicare, as the Pentagon's share has shrunk considerably) has come entirely at the expense of private investment, not at the expense of private consumption. Reductions in tax rates on investment income (the perennial favorite of Republicans) and the ever-popular Federal Reserve monetary stimulus with artificially low interest rates (which was institutionalized when the dollar was cut off from gold in 1971) haven't offset such spendthrift tendencies. If you want to understand why the U.S., Europe, and Japan are falling behind countries like China, you only have to look to the role that welfare statism has played over the past half century in disincentivizing thrift and deindustrializing their respective economies. UBI, of course, does nothing to alter this situation.
I believe the old, boring earned income tax credit is the least bad of our alternatives if we want a safety net. It (mostly) preserves work incentives, helps those most deserving and in need, helps make sure kids are raised in households with adequate means to care for them, and mostly avoids creating an entitlement mentality.
Money for nothing is almost always a bad idea, unless you have someone so disabled they really can't contribute anything. It offends a reasonable sense of fairness among those working and very often destroys the character and lives of those who receive it as well as their children, who don't learn that you need to work to live.
UBI strikes me as trendy intellectual BS.
The Covid relief debacle could be viewed as an unintended UBI experiment (failure).
Three checks amounting to little more than $3,000 dollars for most is not the same as UBI. Sorry, try harder. And the relief was not a debacle except for the overly exuberant segment of our population who spent it on rims and sneakers among other things. (See Steve Sailer for more). Most people used the money for rent, food, to pay off loans, etc.
Humans will always have intrinsic motivation to do things they want. For other stuff we automate. It's our destiny to create abundance, and within that framework, markets make no sense. It's that simple. UBI is just a catalyst to arrive to that state of things.