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You jest, but I think one day we'll discover something that looks a little like socialism, a little like "Star Trek-style" communism, and a little like free market capitalism. And it won't be ideologically driven, but based on all the little experiments that worked combined with all the things that technology and social changes have enabled.

Ideologies are epistemic pathogens.

The USA had the WPA, which did something akin to my proposal. Its budget was 1.3bn in 1935 (23.5bn in 2017), and relative to the US military expenditure (521bn in 2016), it's just not that much money for an incredible amount of public good.

Wikipedia has an excellent page about what the WPA administration accomplished over 8 years -- I think it's an idea worth reviving.

The WPA was an reasonable countercyclical government response to a massive cyclical downturn in private-sector employment.

That's not the problem UBI is intended to address, and the WPA would be an exceedingly poor fit TO UBI’s problem.

Once the marginal costs of all essentials is at or close to 0 we will have a chance.