So your idea is that something will get better because the government helped.
Look at that graph, tell me which things you think the government “helped” with and which things the government mostly stayed out of.
I am 100% for a UBI sort of thing and 100% against the government implementing it. Why? Because that is a stupid idea, much like almost any idea where the answer is “the government will do it”. Here is why:
Why would you desire to give more power to a central authority?
Why is it not obvious to you that when you give a tiny group of people the power to control the lives of millions of people it goes bad, every single time. Sometimes it takes 30 years, sometimes less than ten, but the answer is always the same, the government controlled a resource that can’t be centrally controlled. Sometimes it’s this slow, painful, extraction of people’s ability to contribute to the economy as the value of the currency drops 96% in 100 years. This is a rate that simply causes suffering at new levels such that each new pain thresholds feel normal.
http://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com/2011/04/100-year-declining-value-of-us-dollar.html
What happened with Social Security? It’s the biggest Ponzi scheme on the planet. That isn’t even a controversial statement. Now people who had nothing to do with it are required to pay taxes to repay the debt that was put upon them by their grandparents. Think of this fact every single time you say “government will pay for it”. When I hear that, I hear “Your grandchildren will pay for that (or do you not know about our debt situation?)
What happened when you thought the war on drugs would help anyone (oh you are too young? some of us remember). The prisons are filled with people who were holding a powder or a plant. It wrecked the economies of our neighbors. The people who are victims of these (and other) policies need to find refuge here, causing a cycle of impoverishness and hatred towards them. 1.6 trillion dollars spent on drug policy, no change in addiction rate (in some areas its getting worse). That is how government helps.
People like you (those who think a thing gets fixed when the government does it), Obama and Yang want to help with education costs. So you think with your uncreative socialist brains that the government will fix it by providing loans and grants. Boom! Tuition rises to meet the amounts given out AND student debt skyrockets. Thank you, my kids will appreciate that.
Then you guys with this mindset basically got Trump elected, and you still haven’t learned! How is this even possible? You centralize all this economic power into the hands of a few, then get upset when that same small group of people abuse it to take away the benefits that you got people to rely on.
The right is no better when granted control
It’s not even just you lefties who have their brains stuck on government “fixing things”. The right is no better. Tarrifs are a stupid idea. All they do is raise prices for everything as national companies raise their prices to just under the inflated competitor prices. Creating an enormous surveilance state, the TSA all utterly useless. We are attacking 8 other countries, directly or indirectly doesnt matter, for our “safety??” (and that’s not just the right, your team didn’t reduce any of this when they were in power).
What happens when you implement UBI, and then you get a new president and congress that decides to put drug testing as a condition for getting paid? Or National ID? or whatever. When you centralize the power to implment UBI you get exactly that, centralized control over the UBI. Never mind that fact that the efficiency will be awful (which is one of many reasons why every experiment will UBI has been stopped, not mentioned once above). You will cetainly whine about it not being “real” UBI if these things happen, but it won’t matter because you have centralized the power along with the funds.
Ok Robert, You made your snarky point, but how can we do this as a society?
There are two non-exclusive approaches. Go ahead, implement UBI against every known trait of how it will be abused and misused by those in control. But when you do it, kill every other government program. All of them. Social security, Pell grants, welfare, Medicaid, medicare. Give the government 2 knobs. One to tax and one to set UBI rates. This will greatly hinder their ability to ruin a clean project. UBI should be relatively simple, but when people like AOC get in a room with people like McConnell, UBI will end up being 20,000 pages, it will include military funding, and grants for bakeries. Never mind that this is not just desirable, it is obligatory:
You are suggesting to give 280 million people, 12,000 dollars every year. That is basically the entire US budget. You better start thinking about what you want to cut…or the shorter list, what you plan on leaving in.
Then there is the better solution:
Obviate the Government
Get it out of the chain of financial distribution. Seriously, how can you even associate yourself with blockchain without even considering that there is a solution in blockchain? You are a blockchain consultant?
Dan Larimer has made an argument for using part of EOS inflation as a type of UBI. You should read it. It is obvious you have not, becuase you would have had something better to offer than “The government will do it”
https://medium.com/@bytemaster/universal-resource-inheritance-505e7ca4d048
It’s not just EOS. There are lot’s of blockchain projects designed to lower the barrier to entry, while rewarding people who participate in it. Virtually every proof of stake coin does this. Do you want to grant people UBI? Buy them a node, get them involved with the economy. Is crypto too hard for everyone? Damn right it is, let’s fix that instead of wasting money filtering it through government palms.
The Divi project is focused exactly on this. Their sole focus is making it so that crypto is easy. Its not there yet, but that have made lauching a masternode as easy as using the “buy” button on Amazon. They are introducing things that make the entire ecosystem easy to use for everyone. Thye have lowered the thresholds required to participate, and tehy are making it so that divi holders run the governance, not the Divi project team. Governance without government.
Recently, the Divi community helped out someone in Venezuela who is the victim of policies like those you incessantly keep suggesting. That person is helping a dozen others. Dash is helping there too. The availability of bitcoin also. When your inflation is a bazzilion percent, the banking structure is unavailable, crypto is there to the rescue. Sadly, it’s not available to everyone.
The great thing about crypto is the funds can move immediately all over the world without getting taxed, subjected to fees and filtered though a series of governments and banking institutions. The value of crypto goes beyond the policies of any one government, and one economy and access to it is available all over the world.
Also, why not Give Directly?
If you think UBI is such a great thing, are you particpating in providing right now, to people who are in greater need than any American? Or are you under the assumption that some imaginary lines in the ground make it so that your ideas are only for people on one side fo that line and not the other. Right now, if you think UBI is such a great thing, then I think you should provide it yourself before you continue railing on about how everyone must provide it.
GiveDirectly.org is charity that is doing exactly this. They are providing UBI to people most in need. Unlike the poor in america, these poeple have no TV’s, no cars, and no social support system outside of their small communities. The money you give them is far more efficient and does far more good than any money you dream could be filtered through our own government back to our own people.
