Because individuals are better at determining their priorities than are central planners.
It sounds like your parents were bad with money -- but it also sounds like your assistance with budgeting has been more valuable than the government could ever hope to be.
Edit: Also, it's definitely not just my parents. Look around you, there's payday loans on every corner. My parents only took a couple payday loans that I knew about. Their money-management issues are a drop in the ocean of similar problems.
"Nobody shall be able to force you to spend your money in a way that prescribes a very specific kind of lifestyle."
But they're not spending their money, they're spending other people's money.
ak, If your version of basic income is about taking money from one group and letting another group blow it on alcohol and cigarettes, then it's obviously a bad idea.
No, that's not true. The purpose of the BI is that it's their money and their decision. It's just like when you get salary you get to decide what to do with it, it's not your employers money.
"If your version of basic income is about taking money from one group and letting another group blow it on alcohol and cigarettes, then it's obviously a bad idea."
It isn't at all obvious to me. If everybody would spend money on alcohol and cigarettes, we wouldn't face an ecological crisis, for example. A famous scientist or actor has a much larger ecological footprint than a gambling addict.
Transportation Education Health Childcare Clothes Job-seeking expenses
If you want the flexibility to cover every avenue of "i and my family have a shot at making it," you either arrive at a combinatorial explosion of complex needs-tested programs, or basic income.
Since every program you make will induce some unique form of leakage, corruption or freeloading, the expectation of BI is that it limits that to "some people do not have the personality to manage personal finances, and will always be broke in any given situation." But that doesn't take anything "away" from people who can be responsible - they will in fact be insulated from the drag-the-family-down dynamic that prevails in the deepest instances of developed-world poverty, because they get their own BI at adulthood and can just run away from the situation without severe risk or hardship.
It's better to keep it simple, and avoid the rules, bureocracy, and extra fiscalization.
That said, ubi also would have its flaws: some would use dead people ids to receive it, take from someone else before he receives. It happens here with social security. But that should be easier to identify.