This is why I don't think that government-run UBI is a good idea. We need something to fall back on in case it becomes necessary to do away with a problematic government for a while, not something that the government can use to negatively reinforce the status quo.
Safety nets are for making otherwise dangerous things practical.
What enforcement is needed? Either you opt in to accepting the UBI currency, or you don't. If there's an enforcer involved then you've got government UBI.
As for issuing the tokens, there are a variety of UBI systems that handle that without a centralized authority. CirclesUBI and Idena come to mind. Admittedly some work is needed here, but the technical barriers are not the hard part.
The hard part is establishing the collective political will to build a culture around accepting them, otherwise it's just meaningless numbers.
That sets up a problematic power dynamic. Whoever is doing the giving has power over whenever is doing the receiving.
And you'd want it as an alternative for cases where the other money is questionably legitimate. Like if the people who control its supply have stopped acting in the best interest of the people who use it.
If anything, that's an argument in favor of UBI - it reduces this power by making the giving unconditional. If every citizen is automatically entitled to their equal share, what power dynamic is there, exactly?
If some centralized entity is responsible for disseminating the income, they can threaten to stop, or they can threaten to cut people off.
So I agree, universal solves the problem, but you're not going to get universal from a bureaucracy. You've got to bake it into the design, similar to how backed-by-gold is baked into the design of the money we're currently using. It needs to be legitimate because it's universal, rather than being legitimate because you got it from somebody who has a lot of guns and has promised to behave themselves.
I'm very pro-UBI, I just don't think that saying pretty please to the government is the way to get it.
Sure, we took the actual gold out of it--but we've still got bankers creating money by issuing loans, bankers who are restricted in doing so by notions of scarcity which are pretty much arbitrary, and who have no reason to care whether they're helping or hurting the rest of us so long as they turn a profit and don't break the law. It's the same design as we had in 1933.
It's a system that works, more or less, I just think it would work better if it had some alternatives to compete against. Alternatives would give the powerful a reason to care about non-monetary outcomes.
The government is not some random entity, though. If the bureaucrats don't actually follow the laws written for them, they can be fired (through courts if needed). If the legislators threaten to repeal the laws, they can be voted out.
Yeah, there is some selective pressure on the level of individual bureaucrats, but it's like a bee hive: the individual bees are only part of the story.
The whole thing has aggregate behavior, and we're going to be better off if we develop a way to shape that behavior independently of how we deal with individual bureaucrats.
If somebody offers you money that was issued by an organization that has been bombing your neighborhood or poisoning your water you should be able to reject it and still have other options, because to accept it is to contribute to the continued economic power of your enemy such that they can keep harming you. That's independent of whether you're in a position to have the relevant politicians fired.
So what? The subsidy exists to support the tiny minority who might produce something worthwhile. As it is not possible to decide who this might be ahead of time the subsidy has to be given to all of them. This is essentially the same mechanism used in the provision of universal primary education; it would be a lot cheaper for the state if there were a trivial method of identifying those who would make the most of it so that it could be provided for them and just send the rest to sweep chimneys or beg on the streets.
> This is essentially the same mechanism used in the provision of universal primary education;
I don't know if giving free money to adults who consider themselves artists is the same as ensuring children have access to vital education services. Educating children also ensures there's more a chance they'll contribute rather than be a client/dependent of the state.
Why doesn't the state fund everyone's hobby? I play golf - they should subsidize some of my greens fees. I might end up writing an amazing book that uses my golf experience to push a narrative about the different types of people you meet on a golf course, but we're all "just people" or some nonsense. You never know, it might become a cherished cultural artifact.
Perfect! But instead of giving people money they didn’t earn we’ll instead cut taxes so people have more take home money to pursue the things they’d like to.
Safety nets are for making otherwise dangerous things practical.