Bonus benefit of true UBI as you describe it would be the destruction of the Welfare Industrial Complex, which I think is the primary reason that it isn't implemented.
Bonus benefit of true UBI as you describe it would be the destruction of the Welfare Industrial Complex, which I think is the primary reason that it isn't implemented.
Charles Murray wrote "In Our Hands" yet even he concedes that a deal to replace all the welfare programs with UBI would prove politically and legally unstable since the pressures and logic that got each welfare program started in the first place would still exist and be leveraged by the left as compelling cases of emotional compassionate blackmail for restoration in all of the likely many cases of people squandering their UBI instead of wisely buying enough of the right things (i.e., merit goods and services) who will of course need all those special safety net programs to prevent them from falling into destitition and degradation.
Fundamentally, to make a UBI regime sufficiently robust to withstand such piecemeal augmentation would take a cultural sea change in the direction of aggresive moral uplift and masculine tough love, "their just deserts, not my business, not my problem, the government has no further role to play" callousness in the face of various kinds of predictable misery.
It's not so much that UBI is dead today, but that it is this kind of Victorian-era mindset which has been dead for a hundred years and which would have to be reincarnated in order to provide the foundation upon which any stably workable UBI regime would have to be built.
"Does anyone believe that giving poor people cash will end poverty? And when poverty and all the problems inherent with it persist, then welfare will be expanded."
Absolutely agree.
Bonus benefit of true UBI as you describe it would be the destruction of the Welfare Industrial Complex, which I think is the primary reason that it isn't implemented.
Charles Murray wrote "In Our Hands" yet even he concedes that a deal to replace all the welfare programs with UBI would prove politically and legally unstable since the pressures and logic that got each welfare program started in the first place would still exist and be leveraged by the left as compelling cases of emotional compassionate blackmail for restoration in all of the likely many cases of people squandering their UBI instead of wisely buying enough of the right things (i.e., merit goods and services) who will of course need all those special safety net programs to prevent them from falling into destitition and degradation.
Fundamentally, to make a UBI regime sufficiently robust to withstand such piecemeal augmentation would take a cultural sea change in the direction of aggresive moral uplift and masculine tough love, "their just deserts, not my business, not my problem, the government has no further role to play" callousness in the face of various kinds of predictable misery.
It's not so much that UBI is dead today, but that it is this kind of Victorian-era mindset which has been dead for a hundred years and which would have to be reincarnated in order to provide the foundation upon which any stably workable UBI regime would have to be built.
Exactly! As I replied to another comment:
"Does anyone believe that giving poor people cash will end poverty? And when poverty and all the problems inherent with it persist, then welfare will be expanded."