The NHS is also great value, costing us far less for universal healthcare than the US government spends on healthcare.
The NHS is also amazingly popular, and until the ideological austerity movement was pretty much getting better.
I'm not sure why so many people in the US think that government cannot run things effectively. The NHS is a great example. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than the alternatives? Clearly.
You've missed the point.
The point is that the foundation of the basic income concept is that the income redistribution scheme works flawlessly and according to the people's expectations. This assumption is patently false, as the system is established and managed by people, particularly elected officials and the regime's apparatchiks, who have a long and plentiful resume of manipulating, distorting and corrupting the state to fit their own personal agendas.
I can tell you exactly what happened in my country's income redistribution scheme. It is supposed to be entirely independent of the state and self-managed. Yet' somehow the ruling regime managed to manipulate the system to finance golden parachutes to the nation's career politicians (golden pensions paid off to people who never contributed to the scheme) as well as forcing it as a cash cow to the state as a exceedingly cheap source of state loans.
And it is supposed to be a simple system where worker contributes 1/3 of their salary to finance pensions and unemployment benefits.
That's what these organizations made by people are used for, in reality, and reality always trumps fiction.
Now again, the fact that there is corruption in many countries and money is used wrongly simply means there might be initial or additional work be done, but it definitely does not mean it's inherently not possible, there are plenty of government with low corruption, too.
Finally, what's the alternative? Let the market work and private companies, which I highlighted have the exact same flaws as the government, possibly just on a smaller scale!?
Just putting our heads in the sand and saying this will never work is not a way forward, unless you think of course there's no problem in the first place.
Dubious claim. Most serious proposals are largely revenue neutral and simply redistribute.
> and will require massive taxation to be sustainable.
Not anymore than already exists.
> Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.
It requires no new infrastructure if given as a tax rebate. It also introduces no additional corruption than already exists via tax loopholes. Centralizing all debate and scrutiny over corruption in one location is a benefit of the proposal, not a problem.
I suppose that my previous comment's wording could be construed as assuming we couldexist in a post-scarcity economy. That was not intentional. However, universal basic income does not require a post-scarcity framework to be workable, and the claim that universal basic income will cause inflation to 'spiral out of control' is left unsupported.
Money is currently created out of nothing through the banking system, and the FED controls inflation just fine through various mechanisms e.g. setting interest rates. Basic income proposals can have similar inflation controlling mechanisms e.g. tie payouts to inflation rate or changes in tax rate. In any case inflatuon caused by basic income could be offset by increasing the fed interest rate which is currently near zero.
Actually, it is more economically unsound to maintain poverty in the midst of plenty (i.e, in the US there lies ~6 empty homes for every homeless person), if you consider the external effects. Poverty inevitably leads to violence, drug abuse, disease, overpopulation, war, and other erratic behaviors.
How much more do we spend on bureaucracy in vain attempts to mitigate these resulting effects? Prevention is far more cost effective than maintenance in this case.
On the left, we find the giant social bureaucracy we are all fed up with. The quintessential bureaucratic social state is the British National Health Service (NHS). The advantage of a system such as the treasured NHS is that it guarantees everyone access to affordable and professional care providers whatever your location and your income level. The painful problem, which turned the NHS into a thorn in the side of every British government, is that in the current context of tax revolt, hatred of government, and fiscal austerity, the quality of the experience provided by the NHS can only go down, with longer waiting lines, less customized care, and ultimately a vicious circle in which everybody loses, patients as well as professionals.
On one side, it's economically unsound, and will require massive taxation to be sustainable. Otherwise, it will only work until all the Angels run out of money, then it will cause massive inflation. Mathematically, there are no other options.
Second, who's going to administer it? Governments, being made from people, are notorious for corruption and scandal, and poor service.