One could instead think of social programs, such as UBI, as insurance. People gladly pay >1% of income for insurance. I believe that nearly everyone has the potential to end up in the financial dumps (no one is above drug addiction, serious health problems, mental disorders, lawsuits etc). If a worker ends up there, they'll be glad to have the "insurance coverage" of UBI.

If that is so, why don’t you form an ubi society, whose members pay an ubi for everyone that wants to join (and net pay). According to you it won’t be difficult to find people that are glad to join.

To the downvoters of my initial comment: I don’t want people to die on the street. But I doubt ubi is an adequate cure either.

When the people vote for UBI one day you'll have your society...

...whether you want it or not. Which misses the entire point of it being a society with voluntary membership.

Conversely, if we take 1% of a return on a capital asset, the owner spent zero hours labor for that, so they've lost none of their life ...

Except someone spend labor to amass that capital.

If I considered saving no longer worthwhile, I wouldn’t consume more. I would work less and enjoy more free time. Of course this leads to over proportional less taxes for the state or ubi.

I don’t see why you couldn’t try ubi in small scale by the fans. The most obvious reason why it wouldn’t work on small scale and only on state or global level is because supporters want someone else to pay for it.

> is because supporters want someone else to pay for it.

Yes, obviously? Preferably the people with more than one megayacht?

So if you distribute 1000 USD/month to 300 Mio Americans, do you mind to explain where you want to take the money from?

According to [1] the top 3% (>250k USD household income per year) earn in total per month

    127,300,000,000 = 3,800,000 * 402,000 / 12  USD
    vs 
    300,000,000,000 = 300,000,000 * 1,000 USD

needed to fund your ubi. Maybe it's not enough to take from people with more than one megayacht?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

While I was being slightly flippant in that, I note that your example of $300Bn as being a completely unreasonable, unachievable number for UBI is less than half the US military budget, and in fact represents about the increase from the pre-9/11 post-cold-war low point. Also that most UBI proposals involve fiddling with the tax bands so that above-average earners see much less or no net increase.

"Do you want $1000 each for twenty years or a war for twenty years" was of course a question that was never on the table in 2002.

> I note that your example of $300Bn as being a completely unreasonable, unachievable number for UBI is less than half the US military budget

Check your numbers: US military budget 2019 [1] is $686Bn or $60 Bn per month vs $300 Bn per month for ubi.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...