Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> UBI is a death sentence within direct democracies

Direct democracies are virtually nonexistent at the national level; Switzerland, which is still a mostly-representative democracy, is probably the closest thing there is.

> Introduction beforehand sows the seed for a direct transfer of wealth from the 49% haves to the 51% have-nots.

Means-tested welfare plus taxation, which most countries have, does that, too; I don't see how UBI is any more dangerous in that regard, nor do I see the runaway spiral of voting unsustainable benefits anywhere, despite the popular meme that this is the natural consequence of democratic control of the public purse. So, before I take this particular slippery slope argument seriously, I'm going to need to see some convincing argument of how UBI is different in some relevant way.

The dose makes the poison. The universal nature drastically increases the proportion, from a single-digit minority to a majority approaching 99%, who stand to benefit from increased redistribution. From there it's a spiral to complete redistribution.

But if the threat is people voting to expand it, they can just as easily vote to expand means tested welfare, and just as many people “stand to benefit”. There doesn't seem to be any basis at all to the speculation that UBI crosses some divide where this effect—which has long been used as an argument against democracy itself though it has never been demonstrated—will suddenly become real.

You're describing an artificial minority maintained through means-testing. That's not UBI.

Yes, means-tested welfare is different than UBI. But it's not different in a way that I see any coherent argument makes UBI more prone to being turned into a transfer from the wealthier bare-minority to the poorer bare-minority through democratic process. (Classically, that threat is an argument against democracy generally, recently it's been retooled as an argument against UBI; in both forms its a narrative appealing to the assumed ignorance and venality of the masses that doesn't seem to have much support in actual behavior of real democratic systems.)

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