Instead of income, what about necessities for a modern life? Shelter, safety, medical care, nutrition and internet access? These could be provided at a minimum instead of the income (ostensibly) designed to be used for these things.
Not this story again.
If you provide any of those "at a minimum" then only the "minimum" will be available to the people, and those who will define what the minimum is will be those who have nothing to gain by providing those goods and services, and everythin to gain by cutting all costs and expenses right to the bone.
Moreover, is it really necessary to point out the dangers of letting the state gain control over who accesses to the internet?
The state can control who can access the Internet even now, via the courts, should it decide someone needs to get b&. I'm not sure why a surfeit of every possible resource is going to make the government get more totalitarian.
If the unrolled form of this argument is "human social competitiveness is impossible to extinguish, and even in the presence of historically unprecedented AI-based plenty, those who desire power will subjugate those they deem lesser, for the hell of it", then this makes a whole lot more sense.
I mean, look at SNAP and the ridiculous recurring argument over what parts of a cow it is permissible to purchase with a voucher.
With vouchers, you are ultimately giving someone with a gun the power to enforce that the voucher is spent correctly, with cash you are not (although the why is proving hard to articulate, I'm pretty sure this is true)
I'm pretty sure central planning is inherently coercive and tends to be more expensive than distributed planning. I also think distributed planning is generally more efficient
Not vouchers for housing, you build specific housing for this purpose. Basically communism for the bottom rung of society, though anyone is free to participate in the capitalistic parts of society anytime they wish. High wealth individuals coudl just as easily decide to reap the benefits of free housing and/or nutrition. Just a thought.
Let alone government built housing keeping up with population distribution changes.
I like how your proposal doesn't imply a big public -> private wealth transfer, but I think what you are suggesting is much, much harder than making it rain on everybody
Where do you get the soylent/electricity/housing/phone/internet from?
Are you proposing that the government fire up soylent plants, buy power plants, build, own and maintain housing and become a telecom provider?
Or is the government going to buy from private companies?
I think it's hard to untangle foreign investment from local real estate prices without running into some of the US's fundamental "freedom" tenets, but I haven't looked very closely into what we might do. I feel like it is more of a NIMBY problem, most places
Giving people money to buy food is much easier and cheaper than setting up and administering a system to provide food for people, monitor compliance, etc. Food is available just about anywhere from an enormous number of vendors, producers, suppliers, etc. There's no reason to get government too closely involved there, except of course for food-safety inspections and the like, which we already have. Food is a very competitive industry.
Healthcare, on the other hand, is totally different, and we're already seeing how trying to use a free-market approach there just doesn't work. This is an industry that needs some kind of nationalization (like single-payer coverage, plus a lot of regulation to keep costs down). No one calls up 3 different ERs and ambulance companies when they have a heart attack to see which one offers the best price and service.
Of course, the military is a great logistics machine, but it's also a specialist branch of the government
Government doesn't even need to be in the healthcare business per se: that can all be done by private providers. Government's role is to regulate it to keep costs down (similar to however they do it in places like Belgium), and to provide the funding. If Belgium can do it, we should be able to do it too. But maybe we need to hire the Belgians to help us set up the system....
Private land would remain private.
Of course, then you have "slums," essentially, and problems that come with that.
I do believe, however, that UBI really needs single-payer healthcare for it all to work. If they supply enough UBI for health insurance, the costs are going to be astronomical, or they'll have to tax the working people to death (which will make lots of them just quit and live off the UBI, which will break down the system). Something has to be done to rein in medical costs like they do in European nations for this to work if it's going to include medical care, and really, medical insurance should mostly be eliminated.