What basic income will most likely do is send vast swaths of average people to entertainment and drugs. It's already happening, as social nets get bigger and wider.
All they want is beer, weed, porn, and video games. They don't seem to want relationships, work, friendships beyond smoking buddies... it's saddening, honestly.
I worry that UBI will enable large swathes of these people, permanently stunted in their personal growth, incapable of acting as real adults. Meanwhile, UBI itself may not be a sustainable system; if it results in taxation that cannot be borne by those who keep working, the result will be that it will eventually be cancelled. What happens to all those who subsist on UBI if that happens? Nothing is guaranteed...
Just reflect for a moment on how many of such stunted people existed in 1925, compared to today. Now apply that difference again a few more times, to a segment of the population with above-average fertility, and guess how many generations such a system can last.
Honestly, this says more about your need to judge those people, than those people themselves.
What is wrong with wanting nothing other than beer, weed, and video games? Seems like a nice, simple life. If it makes them happy, why does it make you sad?
Is it because your happiness is shackled by some utopian (or rather, dystopian) dream where everyone "realizes their full potential" or some such nonsense?
He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.
At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.
Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.
I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."
Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.
So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.
Some people are defective. It's just the truth.
It's all of our little brothers. It's an entire generation of lost souls spending their lives on World of Warcraft and Fortnite, feeling like they are accomplishing something by earning another loot crate. When fantasy becomes more compelling and stimulating than real life, it's no wonder.
In the past those people would have loitered around shops (remember when that was a thing), spent afternoons in fishing holes, or just gotten drunk all day, or spent all time reading low-brow fiction.
Escapism is a fact or life and there's not much evidence that people are doing it a substantially higher rate than before. Or, that escapism is actually any worse than being forced to work miserable jobs until you rot away.
It is true that, in today's economy, we try to get spending money to consumers in other ways. Are these alternatives somehow more effective than basic income?
For example, should we be making up unnecessary work for people to do as an excuse to give them spending money? Should we be distorting the labor market by "creating jobs" or artificially boosting wages?
A big part of what a properly calibrated basic income does is that it allows the labor market to be efficient.
You're certainly right that we don't want people to become miserable blobs. That's not a happy life. But what's the best way to prevent this? Is it to withhold money from them and force them to work at unnecessary jobs? Or can we do better?
I, an i suspect many people here, get paid handsomely to move bytes from one place to another and this funds either our ambitions or tastes. I think it's hard to argue that your general well paid tech employee is contributing to society moving bytes around appreciably more than a stoner chilling out on the couch.