There is always a new reason why the most recent incarnation of socialism just didn’t happen to work out as expected this time around.

UBI (in its contemporary form) is most famous for being a product of neoliberal economic and political theory, not socialist economics. The only state in the US that has anything resembling UBI is Alaska[1], and you'd be hard-pressed to characterize them as "socialist."

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

Most of the world has some amount of socialism mixed in.

Originally this was a strategy devised by Otto von Bismark, a Prussian conservative who thought providing concessions to workers might help keep the communists out of Germany. He succeeded.

Over time, it turned out that social benefits can actually be quite effective for other reasons too.

Today, many OECD countries are explicitly social-democratic. Some countries claim to not be socialist at all, but still do have some (possibly more limited) social programs (eg in education and health care).

> Most of the world has some amount of socialism mixed in.

Why do people keep misusing the definition of socialism. Do workers own the means of production? If not, it's not socialism. Now I'm not a socialist but I'd like the words we use to have meaning so that we all know what we're collectively talking about.

Social benefits and social democracy != socialism, people should just use that term instead.

> Social benefits and social democracy != socialism

For so many instances of the word "social", it's difficult to see how we can't just tack -ism at the end and be happy.

Richard Nixon was the closest a president has ever been to implementing UBI and one of the biggest proponents for UBI was Milton Friedman through the negative income tax.

>one of the biggest proponents for UBI was Milton Friedman through the negative income tax.

A negative income tax is most definitely not UBI. You still have to work to get it, therefore it's not universal. It's a pure wage subsidy program.

That is simply not true. If you did not work you would file an income tax with 0 earned income and be eligible for basic income up to the percentage of the break even point. If the break even point was 10k at a 50% rate a person with 0 income would be entitled to 5k.

NIT and UBI are exactly the same, mathematically. You don't need to work to get it – instead your income starts negative.

The whole point of UBI is that it's designed to preserve capitalism, it keeps people consuming and spending in the face of massive automation and job loss, because if masses of people are out of work and hungry, you will get a real revolution.

UBI keeps the means of production in the hands of those who already hold them.

I disagree. I mean this wasn't a perfect UBI experiment, but there are some core assumptions baked in to the arguments I used to make that are clearly flawed.

In particular it was as close as you're ever going to get to being "universal". For obvious reasons, every other experiment I've ever seen made or proposed was not, and I think that's a pretty significant aspect to the idea.

The flaw isn't just in the fact that it wasn't universal (I didn't receive money, for example). It's also in the fact that most (nearly all?) of the people receiving money were receiving it in lieu of income, and in fact were disabled from obtaining income.

Tack that onto a snarled global supply chain, and it's very difficult to pull meaningful outcomes from the noise: did people increase luxury and discretionary purchases just because they could, or were they influenced by an early glut of staple food purchases? Did people increase discretionary spending to entertain children and compensate for a lack of time spent outdoors and socializing? Did they purchase more expensive foodgoods for similar reasons?

I am not a particular proponent of UBI. But I don't think we (meaning us laypeople on HN) are going to be able, from our vantage point, to draw a useful conclusion from the last 30 months' economic activity. It's simply too weird.

You could have received money, if you quit your job.

Right. Which is among the reasons why it isn’t UBI, and is an adjacent factor for why it’s a poor proxy for UBI research.

Except so many people did do exactly that. UBI enthusiasts are saying people won’t quit their jobs etc. if it isn’t universal and forever. But they did.

I don't know what a "UBI enthusiast" is, but I'm not it.

I'm not aware of anybody who claims that people won't quit their jobs if you (1) make them stay indoors and (2) give them money, and (3) invert the economy (justifiably!) for 6 months.

The claim that UBI advocates make is that UBI, when actually applied, is just a negative income tax. Alaska has one, and it doesn't make people quit their jobs.