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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare is reasonable, but the right way to provide people food is to give them money. Otherwise, you can't possibly provide a useful service.

People choose to spend more or less on food, eat different things, etc. If I want to spend a lot on food, that's my choice, but I should give up something else. Or if I decide to eat rice and lentils multiple times a week, I should be able to save money.

Even more important than fairness is just practicality. There's a huge amount of infrastructure dedicated to people going to stores/restaurants to buy food in the manner they see fit.

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> People choose to spend more or less on food, eat different things, etc.

Don't overlook the basic part in the term. The goal is not to provide all the food that everyone wants to eat. It would be to provide basic access to the baseline food needed to be healthy and functioning.

If you want more than that, great. Now you have an incentive to work. That's good, because we must incentivize people to be productive members of society otherwise the whole system collapses.

The intent with providing basic services or income is not to lower the total productive output of a society by removing incentives to work. Its to raise the total productivity by removing the inefficiencies caused when people are too poor, unhealthy, or afraid to work hard or be entrepreneurial.

I get the premise, and agree that UBI should leave people with an incentive to work. Still, there are pretty divergent needs, and I think money is best.

In the latter two years of grad school, my wife and I ate very cheaply. I was always at home or at the office with a fridge and microwave, had time to make bread and things like that. But there are working poor people work places where that's not easy to do, and so they end up spending a good bit more on food.

It's bin-packing. If people have different needs, making each bin big enough for all of them is gonna cost more than giving them money that they can move between their various bins.

Fair. I'm not entirely convinced SNAP is better than UBI for food.

I am entirely convinced that universal healthcare should happen well before we start worrying about UBI.

Why are food stamps (but universal, not means-tested) not a good solution?

They allow basics to have controlled pricing, and increased availability, while preventing abuse of the system (ie, alcohol purchases).

Having dispensaries (or dispensary-specific items in a general store) where you can use your food stamp money would leverage a working system we have now.

Food stamps generally do not allow purchasing hot food or a wide variety of foods that are not considered essential (there is some variation in policies, however). Remove those restrictions, and it would be better.

You would still have the problem that it wouldn't actually provide food for everyone or some people would end up losing the money because they're frugal.

What about people who are addicted (huge problem in the US)? If we give them money, they will spend it on drugs/alcohol/etc. and will still need to be taken care of.

So while food stamps (universal or need based) may not be a perfect solution (selling food stamps for drug money is not unheard of), it is still better, because it makes misappropriating the help provided more difficult.

This is an unreasonably optimistic model of how addicts behave.

There will always be a segment of the population who will take the benefit and use it to make themselves worse off.

But it doesn't matter because far more people will use it for good things like feeding and clothing their families.

On balance, that's better than what we do now, which is that the addicts still abuse substances, but many who are not addicts struggle to provide for their families.

Even with food stamps food can become a commodity and be traded. It's generally a good idea to keep it need based IMO.

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