You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash?
Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project?
UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.
You can see that they exist already, without UBI. So the question is, what effect will UBI have on freeloading if introduced? Will they contribute even less than they do now? Will there be more of them? Or will they stop free-loading off companies and individuals?
If UBI means everyone at the place you work is actually motivated, and you never have to watch your friend support a free-loader again, I think we're probably better off as a society.
You're forgetting about the bit in which you've literally given the person thousands of dollars.
They use that free money to get you to do things for them.
It's hidden behind bureaucracy but it's the same thing. Worse, even, because you don't have a choice.
It's like the nonsense solutions the left propose for tackling crime. "If we give people X, they won't have to steal X". I mean, sure, because they have already gotten it from me for free...
Right, but there are situations where you will pay for something one way or another; we'd like "not paying" to be an option, but trying to take that option causes you to pay in the most expensive way.
If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option.
If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option.
Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them".
So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.
> I... don't believe that it is equivalent to giving free money to people.
And I hope two things are clear:
1. I don't like freeloaders either. I don't ever plan to be a freeloader, and I don't like the idea of paying taxes to enable people to choose a lifestyle of taking and not giving. (Obviously there are people who create value for society that's harder to "capture", like working on open-source software or making art; and there are people who have a harder time contributing because of other limitations, not because of choice; we're not talking about those people here.)
2. I don't claim to know that giving free money to people will help. It's possible freeloaders will take money from the government and companies / individuals; it's possible that having free money available will significantly increase the number of freeloaders. We don't know because we haven't tried it.
What I'm asking you to consider, however, is the possibility that 1) the overall benefits to society of UBI are greater than the harms caused by enabling freeloaders; and 2) there's no way to have UBI without enabling freeloaders.
If that's the case, then our options are:
1. Take UBI and its benefits, gritting our teeth at the necessity of enabling freeloaders
2. Miss the benefits of UBI on principle to avoid enabling freeloaders.
If UBI is a net benefit to society, in spite of freeloaders, I'd have to go with #1 instead of #2.
Consider that our current capitalist system enables lots of other types of freeloaders: people who have inherited enough capital that they can live off the profits without doing any work whatsoever, companies or people who have patented something simple and obvious and are then able to extract rents from the people actually making things, people who buy things and sell them milliseconds later. We put up with this kind of freeloading in capitalism because it's hard to prevent it without damaging the benefits that capitalism brings. The same might end up being true for UBI.
You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash?
Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project?
UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.