I get the impression you're wanting to provide standardized essentials, a room, 5 shirts, 5 pants, government cheese. This invariably leads to weird market issues, people want more of X so they sell off some of Y - for example, using foodstamps to buy steak, then selling it in the parking lot for a big discount. Why bother with that administrative hassle, and innefficiency? the vast majority of people want what they want, and balance their resources as well as they can. The biggest complaint about US welfare is it's so inflexible. "Easy" to get food, but sometimes people need extra cash to fix their car. That's pretty much impossible in the current system.
However that is not desirable in this case since it makes it too easy to live on government money with little incentives to take whatever job you can. If you lived in a government room, got your government clothing and ate in your government chow hall/mess tent/whatever then you could get a benefit out of shoveling dogshit for 10usd/hour since you could get a better shirt, a more tasty meal, etc. You can't sell access to a government bed because every person would be entitled to one, you can't sell access to government food if any person could show up and you could sell your government shit, but to whom? That person would also be able to get 5 shirts.
With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table, you would have to provide incentives to work (since it is better for society), etc.
When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work. And it will be an epic achievement, but in the transition period we still have to use the carrot and stick.
The incentive to take whatever job you can is that even if a job pays very little, that's on top of the basic income.
> With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table
No, the whole point of basic income (vs. traditional means-tested welfare) is that you don't have to do that, and that its counterproductive to do it anyway. All you have to check is "are you a citizen [1]". If you are, you get the benefit.
Working under the table is a tax problem, but its a problem that you already have to address for the tax system, not separately for the benefit system since its not relevant to benefit calculations in a BI system.
> When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work.
With BI at the level that can be maintained without utopian level productivity of that type, people will both need to work and be incentivized to do so; there's no need for an explicit stick, relative deprivation is itself a motivator (sure, not everyone will work, and progressively fewer will work as productivity increases through technology and sustainable BI levels increase. But not everyone needs to work, and BI lets market forces drive that.)
[1] or "citizen or legal immigrant" or whatever the status-based qualification is. Income, etc., isn't part of it.
The goal isn't to provide largess (is it?) its to provide the basics with no strings attached free of charge, anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans.
> "citizen or legal immigrant"
I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals. This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right? Why should specific people starve?
The goal, in my view, of Basic Income is to mitigate the fundamental structural inequity of capitalist markets (particularly in the way that money/commodity exchanges work as a proxy for value/utility), to wit, that such markets weight present utility experienced by market participants by past wealth accumulation, and thus are progressively distortive in terms of distribution of utility.
Providing a basic, no-strings-attached allowance is a means, not an ends.
> anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans.
As it does in BI -- you have to gain income from market exchange to realize utility beyond that attainable with the BI alone. The difference between BI and your "basic welfare" where the government provides a standard-issue basket of goods and services is that BI is simply additive with other income, whereas the limited exchangeability and substitutability of the standard basket of basic welfare goods and services means that it takes a large additional income to get a small additional benefit, which reduces the incentive to provide additional value since, over some range at the bottom.
> I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals.
BI serving its purpose does not preclude other programs serving people present in the jurisdiction of the nation that aren't subject to it. Nor does the example of potential classifications mean that BI couldn't have a different eligibility rule ("everyone physically present in the national jurisdiction" is also a possible rule.)
> This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right?
There are many moral problems. Not all of them have the same solution.
> Why should specific people starve?
I don't recall arguing that anyone should starve.
Are you against the accumulation of capital or do you feel it should have an upper limit? IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society and money saved is debt that hasn't been called in, whether inherited or earned. If society has seen vast productivity gains in the interim then of course money earned by mowing someones lawn a 100 years ago would go a lot further today.
I don't see the accumulation or ownership of capital as fundamental structural inequity
Neither.
> IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society
Obviously, its a way to measure that. I specifically identified how its a problematic way to measure that -- providing equal utility to someone with greater wealth provides greater reward, which means that those who have accumulated wealth -- often aided by inheritance and circumstance of birth -- are most able to redirect society to serve their utility, including reshaping it to direct future wealth to themselves and their descendants. Left unchecked, this tends to make money, overtime, a worse and worse representation of social value provided by the person holding it, and the market value of exchanges a worse and worse measure of the social value of the exchange.
That's not to say that wealth accumulation should not be permitted nor that it should have a fixed upper limit, because those have their own problems.
But it does need to be recognized as a distortion and balanced. and that's increasingly more true the more the rewards of the economy, before considering regulatory interventions, go to capital rather than labor.
Basic Income is harder, how much do I pay to prevent people suffering? Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?
People will still die whatever you do (and whether you do it by BI or whether you do it by central purchasing of common goodie baskets) -- probably more in the latter case than the former, for a given expenditure level, because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ.
> What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?
People can -- and do -- gamble goods when they don't have cash, and get robbed of goods as well; those aren't problems unique to cash, nor are they problems that central purchasing of common baskets of goods makes any easier to address than distributing cash does.
I don't understand how the overhead costs are higher with more predictable results and mass production (or are we defining costs differently?). Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets?
I'm proposing unlimited baskets of goods purely for predictable cost reasons, it doesn't really matter if they gamble them away, although I find it unlikely they'd find any takers since everyone has access to the same baskets.
Welfare is a cost, basic income doesn't seem like it would satisfy that cost in the most efficient way.
There's an agency problem when one actor is making purchasing decisions on behalf of others without any necessary alignment of interests, which, absent other controls (which themselves have a not-insignificant cost, both in terms of administration and in terms of potentially distorting results in other ways), those decisions end up reflecting interests of the decision-maker rather than the nominal beneficiaries -- this is the problem that gives us, on the one hand, outright corruption in government purchasing when there aren't adequate controls, and, where controls are adopted to fight that, frequenly byzantine bureaucratic rules nominally designed to prevent corruption that have the side effects of making both sides of government contracting more costly in administrative terms and effectively restricting government contracting to those entities that specialized in navigating those rules -- restricting competition and decreasing efficiency.
With the central welfare authority deciding what people need, where to source it from, and in what quantities, there are lots of points where either corruption opportunities or expensive corruption controls are necessary; when the only administrative determination that needs to be made is whether straightforward class membership like "citizenship", etc., are met, the number of points at which you either pay the cost of corruption or corruption controls is reduced.
> Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets?
IMO, the goal of BI is, on the theoretical side, to address systematic distributional inequities in capitalist markets, and, on the pragmatic side, to provide a glide-path out of an economy oriented around wage labor as the primary source of individual support as automation and other changes render that increasing less viable as a basis for the economy with broad prosperity.
Enabling people to avoid starving in the streets is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for that.
Because basic income respects human freedom, and as automation advances and the rewards of the economy in pure-market terms increasingly shift even further from labor to capital, a basic income that is adjusted in amount as the economy shifts provides a comparatively light touch redistribution represent rents on the commons that maintains opportunity (as the recipients can choose how to allocate the basic income between present consumption needs and investment in personal development and/or capital) whereas "basic welfare" creates a permanently dependent, effectively unfree, class with no mobility, opportunity, or effective choices.
Incentives to be productive don't go away, can you create something other people want? Art? Literature? Take a loan or find investors. Worst case scenario you end up back on welfare.
Welfare needs to be thought of as a cost, not an investment.
That's a not-entirely-unreasonable (though, still, I'd argue basically flawed) idea for welfare in an economy that is heavily labor dependent and in which the presumption that being jobless is a short-term, transitional situation and where the share of output going to labor (as opposed to capital) is relatively high.
One of the reasons I think ideas like BI have been catching on more recently is that it is increasingly obvious that the economy is, to the extent it ever was like that in outline, increasingly moving away from it and not likely to return to it.
> Incentives to be productive don't go away
With a guaranteed floor rather than guaranteed addition, yes, within a certain range incentives to be productive go away, because any gains up to the amount of the guaranteed floor have zero net return to the person producing them.
Moreover, it would discourage working to get more money, since if you want to move into a less frugal home, you would lose all the benefits of having a government issued one. That choice would then be seen as a net lose.
More fundamentally, in my view, is that basic income represents the citizens pro rata share of a portion of taxation that represents rents on the commons; the purpose government serves is to collect and distribute for efficiency as N:1 + 1:M interchanges involve transaction costs for N+M transactions rather than the N*M that are required for N:M direct transactions, but government has no reason to choose how the rents are spent (and there are, as you note, all kinds of pragmatic downsides when the government does that.)
With a basic income, even the people who are not working can participate in the market and drive the competition and innovation of people who are producing goods and services.
Yet nobody really suffers like they do today, nobody has to go hungry (this also helps those whoes parents aren't good with money, since they will still get food) nobody has to become homeless.
I'm imagining the urchins living in identical concrete boxes that make up the under-city dwellings, lining up in droves for their government pants.
If you want to optimize for getting back to work in an economy which is rapidly changing, you provide (1) resources which are flexible in form so that people can address different reasons why they might be out of work and the different needs they have to meet to get back into work, and (2) you provide aid in a form makes it easy for people to benefit from work income as additive to the aid.
Money is better for both than a standard-issue set of goods.
Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out of fear of death, only for want of choice.