Poverty is the default state. It's there by default. Do nothing, have nothing. Do nothing as a hunter/gather, you're poor relative to your peers and you die.
Whatever cult UBI arises from is attempting to ameliorate the default by giving people something for nothing. Fine. That's honest.
So people claiming all the land in the world is a problem.
UBI in this form is not "something for nothing". It's trading control of land for a share of that land's bounty.
In any case, it's a lot easier to seem industrious if you start out with a huge pile of cash than without. If you park it all in t-bills and live within the coupon income you won't earn any prizes but you won't suffer any real economic anxiety or accusations of impropriety either.
Regardless, the OP was not necessarily talking about the generational wealthy, they quite literally said the "idle rich". And there will always be a fair number of those folks, regardless of whether it was multi-generational or not.
You have to do a lot of work to extract food from the land, which is in the point. If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive. But more likely you'd die from eating a poisonous berry, starve, contract a fatal illness, or get eaten by a predator.
I grew up in the Kimberley region of Western Australia alongside many people who still lived as traditional hunter gathers, in the 1980s I met and spoke with the Pintupi Nine (who had had no prior contact with "modern western culture") as I have some minor grasp of some western desert languages.
Regarding:
> If there was no economy, just you and a fertile wilderness, you'd need to work your ass off to survive.
Normally, Aboriginal groups were easily able to find enough food for their entire clan in three or four hours of hunting and gathering each day.
If you're in a fertile wilderness that you can read like a book and are familiar with then you need to go shopping for a few hours a day.
I have no idea where you got your "work your arse off" notion from - can you cite a source?
I'll concede that many people without a clue would spend a great deal of time thrashing about ineffectively wasting time and energy and then dying .. but we're talking about multi generational hunter gathers on the land they have occupied and shaped through land and plant management over 50+ thousand years.
Curious, what is the minimum requirement for UBI? A pulse?
A tax, but where the tax money goes directly to everyone instead of being allocated by a government.
Secondly, if a government isn't both confiscating and redistributing the money, who are the group of robbers that you would designate doing this instead? UBI requires authoritarianism.
Please see the Alaska example. Alaska isn't authoritarian.
> it's completely authoritarian because there's nothing voluntary about it
Yeah okay. It's exactly as authoritarian as every other tax. I thought you were using normal person language; I'm not going to argue semantics.
On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
Maybe I'm conflating UBI with increased taxes. The money has to come from somewhere, right? I'm in Southern California, where we enjoy some of the highest taxes and most expensive property in the world, so I'm a bit sensitive.
Also, he seems to correlate breathing air to being fed, which is wrong. There are plenty of places to get food for free, stuff that is about to expire gets donated. Just reach out to your local government or community college. It's a lot easier than hunting for it.
Last thing, here in California, about half the state is federal or state parkland and wilderness... The state itself blocks development and adds so much red tape to make housing much more expensive.
Yes, the part about acquiring funds is the same as what we already do.
UBI is an additional way for funds to be distributed.
> On the flip side, I wonder how much can be taxed? Is there a maximum? Currently, I work for the government through June.
That depends so much on the details of the system.
People on the lower end will gain more UBI than taxes increase. People on the upper end will get less UBI than taxes increase. The tipping point could be anywhere in a large range.
One version of UBI is simply a system where your income tax starts at a negative amount of dollars.