It recently occurred to me that the complex Byzantine structure of the existing welfare state does have one major advantage over UBI: it’s significantly harder to make the entire thing agenda driven. As soon as you have a UBI, there will be massive political pressure to use it for some agenda.
Of course everyone gets UBI…
…except the polluters
…and CO2 emitters
…and meat eaters
…and porn watchers
…and weed smokers
…and tobacco smokers
…and alcohol drinkers
…and maybe it’s distributed on a curve, depending on race
It could be corrupted so easily. And it’s a single point of failure.
Cash welfare is extremely good, but an advantage of directly giving out non-cash welfare like food stamps is that they can't be stolen from the recipient. ie if everything was UBI and you ended up in debt or someone stole your bank account contents, you still can't pay for groceries. But with a guaranteed free groceries program then you can always get something.
Unfortunately, non-cash welfare has tons of the manipulation you describe. You can get kicked out of public housing for using drugs and food stamps have all kinds of arbitrary limitations on them based on what the state legislature thinks you should be eating.
> It recently occurred to me that the complex Byzantine structure of the existing welfare state does have one major advantage over UBI: it’s significantly harder to make the entire thing agenda driven
Uh, no, it's not.
The byzantine structure is because of (and in part to disguise the way that) every component of the system is agenda driven, and often by an agenda rather divergent from the overt purpose of the programs.
Of course everyone gets UBI…
…except the polluters …and CO2 emitters …and meat eaters …and porn watchers …and weed smokers …and tobacco smokers …and alcohol drinkers …and maybe it’s distributed on a curve, depending on race
It could be corrupted so easily. And it’s a single point of failure.