>I would much rather see a universal basic services program that guarantees universal free at the point of use access to services such as housing, healthcare and education provided directly by a government body or non for profit enterprises.
I agree that creating such a program creates political incentives for increasing it over time in excess of inflation. That's a real cost that needs to be weighed against alternative approaches.
But consider what happens when you make services "free at the point of use access". The price no longer serves the purpose of summarizing and transmitting information about the good or service. The consumer of the "free" good no longer gets any information about the scarcity or quality of the resource, and the provider no longer gets any information about the demand for their good and consequently how much to produce. Prices are the primary mechanism for coordinating decisions efficiently by summarizing actionable decision making information and economizing on expensive knowledge acquisition, interpretation, and communication costs.
It should hardly be a surprise when demand and consumption of those goods and services with a zero price goes up, and supply and quality goes down. Now suddenly you need to grow large bureaucracies for rationing the resources which will inevitably miss the mark of serving disparate individual needs as efficiently as the price mechanism could in a free market.
It's the classic recipe for degrading quality and creating shortages. I believe it's much more desirable for housing, healthcare, and education to be served by the market precisely because of how important they are to people. Putting cash into people's pockets directly has a much smaller distortive effect on market operations, and allows people to express their preferences in allowing them to vote with their dollars, as opposed to "free at point of service / consumption" goods and services.
It's no accident that UBI was proposed by Friedrich Hayek, and the Negative Income Tax by Milton Friedman. You could hardly accuse either of being in favor of wealth transfers, but they both understood the profound negative consequences of distorting prices, which essentially is lying to economic decision makers about the costs and benefits of taking certain actions, resulting in inevitably less efficient allocation of scarce resources that could possibly have been used more productively elsewhere in the economy.