https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-i...
from the same author
from the same author
He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.
Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.
In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.
You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't:
• Dead
• Non-citizen
• Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc
• In prison
• Moved abroad
and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance.
Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
"Food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past", huh?
18 million households in the U.S. were food insecure in 2024.
And that's from 2024. How much was oil then?
That's a bold statement. And depending on how you define famine it might even be true-ish. But I'm quite certain most poor people in the 1920s would disagree with you.
Which is why we got the russian revolution and both world wards at that time. All 3 were partially caused by 19th century industralisation creating an poor, hungry underclass.
Poor people in 1920 would agree with me. We know this because in this era Marxist ideas were already quite old, well known and widespread. He argued for what was effectively a UBI or very generous welfare system under a different name. He predicted the poor would rise up as capitalism drove their wages to zero and "alienated" them, then they'd overthrow it. But Marx became bitterly disappointed in his lifetime when capitalism didn't fail, wages didn't fall to zero and the working classes rejected his call to revolution.
Technological progress hasn't caused famines, it's ended them. What has caused several famines, though, is left wing people reorganizing society via force to solve imagined problems. If you're worried about people not having enough to eat, you should be terrified of a UBI.
The British never forced anyone in Ireland to export food "at gunpoint".
Germany, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, Australia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan..
Which of these have trouble verifying identity reliably, to the extent that it would be a meaningful obstacle to UBI?
But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification.
The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there, and it's an island. There's no centralized identity scheme and during COVID more people came forward for vaccination in some age bands than theoretically existed at all.
Germany fails at reliably verifying that people who turn up for a language test as part of naturalization are the same people being given citizenship: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/69787/germany-police-ar...
All countries struggle with basics like "is the recipient of the welfare dead". Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/italian-man-dr...
Paying out money to dead people is a very common problem. Here's an EU report on all the basic ways countries get defrauded by failing to track basic facts about identities:
https://www.ela.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025-03/SSC_fi...
"Common fraud and error cases include falsified documents (birth, marriage and death certificates), identity fraud and falsified non-payment certificates"
Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.
I assume you want to stop the state pension as well then?
The "still paying dead people" problem exists in the current pension system, so we already have bureaucracy in place to solve that one (yes, it's not 100% accurate, but it works sufficiently well en masse) so no need for new bureaucracy there.
Or you issue UBI all at once during the month, and you stamp everyone who receives it with an indelible ink mark that takes longer than a day to wear off; like they do in poor countries to prevent double voting.
It's a solvable problem. The problem is that the "cost of managing welfare" is a small percentage of the cost of welfare, you can't pay for doubling/tripling it by saving 5%.
> Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.
It's already in place regardless of UBI, so it doesn't add meaningful costs.
Of course it's never going to be perfect, absolutely nothing is. Why even mention that? What matters is the impact of it being imperfect.
Compare it to the impacts of tax evasion, or wage theft, and they'll be completely negligible.
If we're going to use authority arguments.
Anyway, subsidized jobs programs is my answer. Pay people to do jobs. Plant trees! There's so many places that could use some reforesting. There's no shortage of work to do.
it is in all large societies. That's true. But it is not in most small primitive societies. SO it's not like a law of nature, but more that we haven't found a system that works as well for large groups.
The trouble is that capitalism also has it's problems, and they're getting exacerbated by technological advancements. If you automate everything at a certain point there's just nothing to do for a large part of the population. And at that point the system stops working.
In science fiction we would get the 'post scarcity society', but nobody knows how that should work.
The UBI systems I've seen proposed that just might work are a sort of golden middle between those two. Not that different from the current welfare system we have in NL, but taking out the stress factor and stigma of receiving welfare.
For people who are employed it could be done by existing systems already used to calculate tax (which is deducted automatically by employers here so the systems to do calculations exist).
Self-employed people already have to register with HMRC.
For the rest it is a far, far simpler than the requirements of the benefits system and less prone to fraud.
> You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing.
No one claims it can be made to work using ONLY money saved from means testing. Something like removing means tested benefits together with lowering tax thresholds could work though.
I'm not sure this is stupid. I think the people against the negative income tax system are kind of stupid. Like, the best place to apply the welfare rules is where all other complicated rules about income are made: the tax office (IRS). If you decide that for whatever reason you really really want people receiving welfare to be second class citizens, you'd go out of your way and build a separate welfare office, where all the work the tax office is doing gets to be duplicated for no reason other than so you as a working class citizen can pay even more money to be angry at the second class citizens.
Overall, it sounds kind of stupid. You build a bureaucracy that designates people as a special class, so that this special class is difficult to escape from, since if everyone was a continuous recipient of welfare, there would be no second class and "escape" would merely be progression through the simple passage of time.
The dumbest arguments I've seen are extremely cranky and boil down to rich people becoming net beneficiaries of CO2 dividends, because they spent tens of thousands of dollars on EVs, heat pumps, cycling, insulation, solar panels, etc so they can get 100% of an annual 100€ CO2 dividend. Like, giving 100€ to even a single rich person is such a horrific crime, that it's better if everyone else, who actually needs it, should get less than the 100€ even if that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of € being diverted away from people who actually need the money to compensate their CO2 taxes.
Ok, I meant to say: it feels a bit stupid. I hope the rest of my post show that I actually don't think it's stupid.
In my country the people that are producing and selling eggs do it almost for free, they could do something else and get much more money, but they choose to do eggs. My theory is that people choose to do stuff not just because of the money. Narrowing all the interests to just money doesn't capture the complex reality. When you cancel the money thing, you let people choose what to do based on their real ambitions and aspirations, removing the alien interest (money) that skews the world so much that even geohotz got confused.
However, if we have to pay e.g. miners millions to compete with a high UBI, we trigger a massive wage-price spiral. Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain, those costs cascade and multiply, eventually making the finished goods unaffordable for the very people receiving the UBI.
In reality, markets don't solve the scarcity of un-fun labor through magic efficiency. They solve it by leveraging debt, poverty, and an exploitable lower class to keep the foundational costs of society artificially low.
Without this DesperationFloor™, the math of our current commodity-based economy falls apart.
Extracted raw material is incredibly cheap. Human industry and ingenuity are the real scarce resource, and UBI leverages these to an unprecedented extent. Debt and exploitation are an anti-pattern, even for a capitalist economy; they're deeply antithetical to true industry and creativity.
Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.
Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.
Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances.
I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall.
The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - which is actually not that common), but really not otherwise.
The problem always is that you can't stop and get off the tiger. No country can withstand the shock of a major cut in spending, because the population can't absorb the hit.
The reason why the debt keeps growing endlessly is that there is a 0% lower bound on the interest rate, which if you think logically about it, means that debt can only grow, mathematically speaking. This creates the impression that debt is always a future burden that is eternally carried forward as if it was nuclear waste.
If the market interest rate is below zero, either the government and the central bank must intervene to maintain the state of the money system above zero, because that is the only representable state. The government can subsidize the difference between the market interest rate and the money system interest rate clamp by taking on private debt and turning it private. This is particularly evident once private corporations refuse to take on further debt.
However, even if the government stopped the subsidization, you still don't get out of the conundrum. The government is patching the symptom with its cause, which stalls the problem into the future, which is "good" if the cause is considered good and only the symptom is considered bad.
The same way housing is needed for living, money is needed for trading. Similar to housing becoming an investment and therefore no longer being able to be used for its intended purpose, money can face the same fate. When people use money as an investment, it can't be used for trading. Houses sit empty and money sits idle.
It turns out that money is such an integral part of the economy that if there is no money, people can't acquire the goods they need to survive and since there is a monopoly on money systems, you can't just switch to a private provider to perform the trading you need in case the government one fails.
In other words, you either choose between a fully formalized money based economy or subsistence lifestyle with nothing in-between. The difference between the two is so stark, that a failure in the money system might as well be the collapse of all elements of society. From that perspective, it is quite smart to keep kicking the debt can down the road. Meanwhile the person who refuses to kick the can will doom society unless they implement the possibility of negative interest in their money system.
A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door.
The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time.
This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology.
If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes.
(you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against the commonly held belief.
Also, the UK's economy stopped growing in 2008.
The closest we could get would probably be to execute anyone involved in advertising, but that won't go over really well.
Laughs in chinese
(and yes I'm aware they use instances of capitalism. The difference is they have hard checks in place)
I may do it too, but I don't think I'd actually ever write it down.