With cash, the recipient gets $20 worth of value to spend on what they need most. They don't need to barter the asset they received, they can directly participate in consumer markets to get what they need. We also already have the mechanism to generate these cash flows, in the form of interest and dividends on capital assets.
I'm all for tangible assets, but I believe that a majority of people will be against it.
Having a WBS in Berlin is far from ensuring you actually get housing.
> Having a WBS in Berlin is far from ensuring you actually get housing.
That's true, but that's because of the limit of existing apartments, not because the government doesn't pay for it. Similarly, the government guarantees healthcare, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a change in the housing market (that is: more building projects in general, but primarily more properties + subsidies given to cooperatives), but it's another issue.
Regarding:
> the government guarantees healthcare, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy.
It guarantees you will always get treated if you seek such treatment (within reason, basically all actual medical problems will be treated for free here). I had spent 3 weeks in a hospital including numerous tests (MRI, CT, ultrasound) & concluded in brain surgery.
I paid next to nothing & despite nobody being able to guarantee the procedure would be a success I think this is as close as you can reasonably get.
I would be surprised if the same in the US will not have resulted in a hefty bill, even for most people covered under generous employer-backed health insurance.
If we need 4 million apartments, but only 3.5m physically exist, we can't decree the remaining 500k into existance, they still need to be built. They are currently not built for unrelated reasons (city planning, permits, speculation etc), not because "we" (as a society) don't want them to be built. I don't see that changing anytime soon in the large cities, because the population is generally against higher population density, construction projects and longer commutes. Policies will not change that, unless massive changes in laws take away citizen's ability to protest and stop new development projects.
If however, we had government built apartment buildings that could be partitioned out and made available for free only to those who need it, that would actually help solve real problems, and wouldn’t even disrupt those who depend on their property values rising. Imagine such buildings right here in San Francisco.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Life-at-the-bottom-S-F-s...
Moreover, I do not see how this is better than just giving an income. Income is more flexible and fungible. There are already economies of scale in a free market.
Why? If it’s not being spent on those things anyway isn’t the person just making a financial mistake?
Sounds a lot like we'd just push the problem a few meters away and then run into it again.
Welfare (at least in America) has all the wrong incentives that make it difficult to improve your situation (e.g. lose benefits and all your time if you get a minimum wage job, and who is going to watch the kids now).
You can't be a free man if your wellbeing 100% depends on someone else's decisions regardless of your actions.
The idea of basic income is not equality of outcomes, its equality of opportunity.
The problem I have with most socialist policies is not that funds shouldn't be provided to help the poor/everyone, but because the plans often are designed around the belief that individuals should not be trusted to make decisions about their own lives.
I believe in a fiscally liberal libertarian policy..Federal money should be distributed to individuals and local governments without any strings attached, because only the Federal government has the power of printing currency to meet the public good.
In aggregate, I do trust people to make good decisions, and those that do will get rewarded.
So no food for them for the rest of the month? Good luck with that.
Either people are treated like adults and manage their own finances, or we are all wards of the state to some degree.
If they were adults with the ability to manage their finances, make smart decisions etc, only a tiny fraction of them would have to rely on the state in the first place, so that's not convincing to me.
This is exactly what happens today, and it's ostensibly the problem that UBI is attempting to solve. If UBI doesn't solve that problem then it's just a very expensive waste of resources.
The argument for the first approach is that people know better their needs and that money is not enough to cover both while the proponents of the second approach say that it's a false dichotomy, giving money to a poor family without access to healthcare or education is likely to increase the gap between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, etc. So the current cycle we're trying to break, will become more vicious.
I took for granted that we should hand out both, unconditionally.
Which is a silly argument, because anyone who needs those things and is given the equivalent money can use it to buy them.
Indeed, it gives them less opportunity because it deoptimizes what they can use the money for. If you need education, there are merit-based scholarships. There are creative solutions like your father taking a job as a janitor at a university where the children of full-time staff pay no tuition. Or getting a two year degree at a community college which gets you a lower middle class job instead of minimum wage which gets you enough money to pay for a bachelor's degree over a few years in night school. And then you can take the government money as money, save it up and use it to start your own business.
But if the money has to be used for school, then you use it for school, any ingenious alternative method of paying for school is for naught, and you graduate still poor and have to take the first job offer you receive in the rat race because as soon as you get kicked out of the dorms you immediately need first and last month's rent plus the security deposit.
Nothing about BI is silly, BI could make or break our future. All assumptions should be double-tested and nothing should be taken lightly.
> [...] because anyone who needs those things and is given the equivalent money can use it to buy them.
Cancer treatment for example in Europe is mostly mostly free. In Cuba is totally free. In India can be cheap. In US is very expensive.
> Indeed, it gives them less opportunity because it deoptimizes what they can use the money for. If you need education, there are merit-based scholarships.
Scholarships are for the 1% of the population. I am not sure we should take them into account. Plus scholarships are based on scores. A kid growing up in a troubled family has much smaller chance of getting one compared to his peers.
> There are creative solutions like your father taking a job as a janitor at a university where the children of full-time staff pay no tuition.
I'm not sure we're on the same page here, what problem do you think that BI is trying to solve???
Healthcare is a debate unto itself, but the short version is that all else equal a given amount in cash to buy health treatment/insurance should be no worse than the same cost in tax dollars worth of government health coverage, and better because it gives the individual the choice between how high of a deductible they want vs. how much of the premiums they get to keep in their pocket etc.
> Scholarships are for the 1% of the population. I am not sure we should take them into account. Plus scholarships are based on scores. A kid growing up in a troubled family has much smaller chance of getting one compared to his peers.
Every individual thing is for 1% of the population. The point is there are a hundred different things. One person gets a scholarship, another needs food money more than housing money because their aunt lives near the school, another has a brother in the same major and can share books etc.
> I'm not sure we're on the same page here, what problem do you think that BI is trying to solve???
Among other things, it's trying to solve the problem that the only way to get ahead with low resources is to make efficient use of what you have, but assistance that is required to be spent in bureaucratically-specified ways is a de facto prohibition on that.
With your suggestion you assume what people want and provide something that kind of match that (people don’t want a house, they want a specific kind of house at a specific location, same for the clothes), while the basic income approach is just a tool to help people participate in the market, without any guess of what people actually and the full logistical process required to distribute those goods.