Poor understanding of UBI. It's a floor. A foundation. All income is earned on top of it. It does nothing to discourage work, unlike welfare that disappears with work. UBI is activating. It is empowering. People fund the work that's best for them, paid or unpaid. They start their own business. They go to school to learn something. They pursue volunteer work and caring for others.
Over and over again, the evidence shows that UBI is activating not demotivating. No one wants to do nothing. People want to feel like they are contributing to society in some way. And people definitely want to earn as much as they can to spend what they want to spend.
UBI is not the only thing we need to do. It is just a key thing we need to do because it makes other things easier to do. It's the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. It's money to buy boots with straps. It reduces poverty, insecurity, and inequality. That leads to less crime, better health, and more productivity. The spending of UBI creates jobs. It grows the economy due to people with lower incomes spending it mostly locally on local goods and services.
If you don't support UBI, you either don't understand it, refuse to study the mountain of evidence, or simply distrust others and/or want to control them.
UBI is the power to say no. It is power to the People. It is a redistribution of power. People will use that power in so many good ways you can't imagine and aren't giving them credit for.
UBI is the correct answer. It is not the only answer. But it is a very important one.
This is a silly piece that makes a false assumption after false assumption. It's just not the case that UBI creates excess inflation. It can, but in order to do so, it has to be designed in a particular way in a particular economic environment.
This piece of mine gets into the variables to consider:
Articles like this are so annoying and no surprise coming from a Manhattan Institute guy.
Of course UBI is effective. We have hundreds of studies to look at to determine this, not just two.
The NYT article was shit too. It's one thing to say that $333/mo of UBI to a family of 2 or more didn't appear to have brain development impacts that were measurable within the first few years of life. It's another to say UBI isn't effective.
We know that a guaranteed monthly income floor has all kinds of positive impacts especially on kids, and especially if kids are prevented from living in poverty for their entire childhood.
And never forget that a key component of UBI is universality. It's one thing to study the impact on an individual. It's another to test the impact on an entire community.
In the Dauphin pilot where an entire town got it, crime went down 15%, violent crime went down 37%, and hospitalization rates went down 9%. You aren't going to find stuff like that in any pilot that isn't a saturation pilot testing universality.
According to the logic used in this, Alaska is an autocratic regime. But when I look at Alaska, I see a state with the lowest poverty, lowest inequality, and highest well-being of almost all 50 states. I also see a population who comes out to vote, especially when anything dividend related is voted on.
It's stuff like this that really annoys me, and I feel gives academics a bad name. It's coming up with what-ifs and not applying any applicable evidence to it. Take this for another example:
> "Will the working minority agree to support non-workers with ten or twenty children per family? Will that be sustainable?"
Are you fucking kidding me? Does anyone really honestly think that there's a high percentage of women out there wanting to give birth 10 to 20 times? Is that theoretically possible? Sure, but that doesn't make it in any way probable. In fact the evidence we have again points in the opposite direction.
I really don't see any value in writing shit like this. Why not next write something about the concerns of universal health care, and how people might use it to drink so much they just replace liver after liver? Or maybe people will feel they could then rob banks because if they got shot, they'd have free health care. Are these things theoretically possible? Yes. But that doesn't make them not stupid to express.
Look, in general, democracies all over the world, in addition to UBI, need to be strengthened through dropping ideas like first-past-the-post, and adopting ideas like single-transferable-vote that feature more proportional representation and lack spoiler effects.
With that said, I only see those changes as more possible through UBI because people with their basic needs met have more time and mental space to engage in being more informed and more involved as citizens.
Look at how involved seniors are and how much power they have. Government answers to them. It's not the other way around. They don't lose the right to vote because they are no longer part of the labor market. Instead they vote in even greater numbers. And guess what happens when that happens? You get represented.
Articles like this are written by those who don't bother to look at the evidence around them and instead choose to use imaginary thinking in the hopes of influencing others.
Basic income is freedom FROM tyranny, not the threat of it.
Basically, more and more money only chases the same amount of goods if the UBI does not exist as a transfer of existing money from top to bottom and middle as described in this piece, and instead exists as continual expansion of the monetary supply through newly created money.
Additionally, UBI does not eliminate forces of market competition. In fact, I argue it will even increase competition through increased entrepreneurship. It would be really stupid to raise your prices in a competitive market where your competitor does not raise prices, or even lowers them.
As a quick example, every year when Alaskans get their dividend checks, there are a lot of sales as businesses compete for that money. It would be a really stupid business in Alaska that increases its prices every time the dividend is distributed, in the knowledge people have more money to spend.
As for comparisons with welfare, it's the strings that are the problem with welfare. Think about it. If you are receiving $12,000 in welfare and get a job earning $20,000 you are likely to have a new total of around $20,000. That's because welfare gets pulled away with paid work.
With a $12,000 UBI however, getting a job earning $20,000 would leave you with a new total of $32,000. See the difference? With UBI there is more incentive to work because it's not pulled away with work. UBI doesn't punish you for working. Welfare does.
You know what's interesting? This gun analogy of yours, Penn Jillette has a great video about it. The video is of a talk he gave at the Cato Institute, explaining why he's a libertarian. I think you'd like it.
I've also written about this fear before myself, and I suggest everyone look at Social Security and the Alaska Dividend for evidence. Do these programs make for more compliant citizens? No, the opposite is true.
Basic income has no conditions, and because everyone gets it, it will quickly be seen as a right of citizenship. Good luck as a politician touching that third rail. I'm sure seniors would have no problem whatsoever being told what they can or can't buy with their SS checks.
You hit on exactly one of the biggest problems with the piece. It is the inability of anyone to say no to shitty paying jobs that requires the existence of minimum wage laws in the first place. As long as people can't say no, because they need the income to survive, they will say yes to shitty wages, hours, benefits, etc.
This author should ask himself, if he earned $1k/money for breathing, would he accept a shitty job for $7/hr? If not, how much would it need to pay before he would accept?
Then the next question is what the effective wage of automation would be. If because people have basic income, no one will work that job for less than $15/hr and a machine can do it for $10/hr, then it now makes more sense to automate that job out of existence.
And that is the direction we should aim for as a civilization - full unemployment, not full employment. Humans should hand as many jobs to machines as we can, to free us up to do the work we each feel is most valuable, paid or unpaid.
Enough with this pro-toil mentality that sees value in everyone being employed, even if for only 4 hrs a week in order to employ 100% of the population. As if that is even possible anyway. Like what, we're going to have 10 doctors share the work load of one doctor so that everyone can be employed? And what of all the work that goes unpaid? We should just keep not recognizing that? And what of all the jobs that don't need to exist? We should keep those around so that people can fill them to prove their right to live?
Full employment in the 21st century is a bullshit goal. We as a species are better than that. Our goal should be to free ourselves to pursue what we each wish to pursue.
And anyone who thinks people's ability to organize will be in any way diminished instead of monumentally expanded with basic income, isn't giving their fellow man enough credit.
People will use basic income to give themselves greater voice. I guarantee it.
As the author of OP's link, you may be interested in reading what I've written about this question as well, this idea of inflation eroding everything, or what I call "The New Zero Argument":
Yes, it's not a printing of new money, but a transfer of existing income towards an economically and socially healthier distribution less tilted towards the incredible extremes we have now.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/the-ai-pledge-for-humani...