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Comment by aub3bhat | Hacker News Reader

I think the reason for huge support behind Basic Income is failure of government in efficient allocation of its resources. The current generation with its experience with public education, spending on unnecessary wars and other poorly run government programs no longer trusts government to effectively deliver services. Thus Basic Income seems like a natural solution. I honestly would prefer a smaller government that reallocates resources, over Bernie Sanders style big government socialism.

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Why does it follow that the answer to an inefficient government is to give that same government more power to redistribute wealth?

Being a big inefficient government and redistributing wealth are not mutually exclusive.

It's important to distinguish between rights- and incentive-based objections to redistribution and efficiency-based objections to government spending. The government as an organization of humans is very inefficient and wasteful at accomplishing actual tasks (e.g., building bridges), but it's actually very efficient at redistributing wealth through pure transfers (e.g., the administrative overhead of social security is negligible compared to the amount redistributed). Thus the best objections are grounded in bad incentive effects or property rights, not the inefficiency of government.

I interpreted the parent comment is implying ineptitude by the government in delivering positive outcomes and my comment is in reply to that. If the regime is inept at delivering solutions why would we entrust it to take more by way of taxation to support a basic income.

My comment is not about the efficiency or admin overhead of printing checks. It's about trust in government to deliver an outcome.

Trust obviously depends strongly on the task. I trust my dog to fetch the ball but not do my taxes, because he's a lot better at the former.

> I think the reason for huge support behind Basic Income is failure of government in efficient allocation of its resources.

Basic Income is interesting because (a) it removes the requirements for administration of social security and policing of fraud, and (b) because some people think increased automation/AI will create increased unemployment so a different approach would be beneficial.

I'm not aware of evidence to support a view that poor implementation of particular social security programs is a driver.

So in response to excessive spending people want to spend more?

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