Do you feel more confident that a government entity would do a better job at picking a family or students? Or would you only want to do it if everyone at your income bracket was also doing it?
Serious question, not trying to be a dick.
They give it to everybody. If you think that the government does a poor job of allocating the absolutely colossal amounts of money currently spent by social programs, or you recognize that trying to "do a good job" and prevent fraud, and all the other social engineering requires a vast, wasteful bureaucracy, then this is an interesting option.
This is a program that eliminates extreme poverty, but requires almost no infrastructure. You'd only need to verify that recipients are citizens and that they file their taxes. Since you can abolish Social Security, a stripped down social security bureaucracy, which already prevents people who haven't paid into social security from receiving benefits, could take over that task.
It could allow one of the largest and most sweeping reductions in the size of government in our lifetimes.
And if you believe in freedom, but also want to live in a country where people don't have to beg for food, then this is your best bet. You trust people to make their own decisions about what benefits them and their family. You don't discourage work or enterprise.
I think it's a political long shot of epic proportions, but also a great idea.
I have never seen anyone advocate for UBI who expressed any position other than support for using it to replace, at a minimum, means-tested poverty support programs, and generally they want it to replace many other targeted social benefit programs that currently provide services, direct subsidies for selected purchases of goods and services, or indirect subsidies through tax credits and deductions for purchases.
The usual argument for UBI is that it eliminates the most of the administrative overhead and duplication of function in the multiple programs it would replace, as well as replacing the perverse incentives that occur with means-testing.
The fact is, our .gov is doing a pretty shitty job as far as social contracts go, and the incentives for playing nice only exist once you've bought into the thing wholesale and are doing quite well for yourself.
Given the way we treat felons, the poor, and the ill I'm rather surprised things aren't boiling over sooner.
And in any case, I don't think a handful of people donating to charity is a serious systemic solution to inequality and poverty. For one thing, it fails to give a guarantee of a safety net, which is what's needed to give people a believable backstop. For another thing, there's a bit of an adverse selection problem: people who get rich retroactively decide they have no need for the existence of a safety net, and don't want to pay for one, because poorer people are lazy/stupid/etc.
I did move from California to Denmark, which is in a way putting my money towards what I'd like to see more of (due to visas/citizenship/etc. this is not equally easy for everyone). I now pay more taxes, and in return I am part of a more social-democratic system.
And, IIRC, Denmark rates much, much higher on social mobility than the US.
And with universal basic income, recall that there is no 'picking' performed.
If your going to talk about a socialist country you may have a point. But unfortunately I think your going to find you dont have as much evidence as you thought you did, should you do some research.
The most productive level of intellectual growth in the history of mankind has consistently come out of groups of people who have been 'freed' from the burden of worrying about their 'next meal' so to speak. From renaissance era patronage through to the modern trends you see with the flow of capital in California.
Socialized != Socialist.
A centrally planed socialist economy has no place for entrepreneurship at all, ergo it will be suppressed and not flourish. A socialized economy is one where all citizens are invested into the social fabric of society, for instance I have a level of free health care here in Australia, but I choose to work and pay for a higher level of medical care and I am free to do so. This is a socialized system, a socialist one would deny my right to chose a higher standard via some logical argument about the higher standard I want to pay for being excess capacity that should be redistributed to all.
I hope this brief illustration helps clarify some things to anyone else that might be having trouble seeing a clear difference between socialist and socialized.
I think this is general answer to this question (at lest it's mine). It's similar to prisoner dillema: I am happy to agree to rules forcing cooperation but in absence of those I won't cooperate that happily (reasons I think are easy to imagine and I've just seen that one poster did great job explaining those).
The purpose of government, if it can be said to have a purpose at all, is to cover those items where we're better off doing them but they wouldn't happen on their own due to various game theory considerations or just plain transaction costs.