I am absolutely in favour of the UBI, not just “because it sounds like a nice idea” but because it’s increasingly becoming an economic necessity as thinkdr said.
One has to ask themselves the question: what is the purpose and motivation of creating better and better technologies?
Given the “mixed economy” model of the West and not some radical transformation that half the population consistently votes against, we are in an economic environment of being monetarily motivated to supply evermore innovative ways of meeting demands. But simply eating into the market share of already-established businesses, that might only provide a relatively basic version of what people want in some way or other, is not as lucrative as enhancing technologies to make the provision of goods and services even more efficient.
Enhancing technologies to improve the provision of goods and services is what the West does. The point it seems is to shirk the classical liberal self-regulating ideal of “perfect competition” and manufacture one’s very own monopoly or at least oligopoly through product differentiation: “my product isn’t just the same as all the others in the same market” - even if it takes psychological tricks to force this, through advertising a unique association with your product. You’re rewarded for abusing the system in your favour, and better technology can give actual substance to claims of “a better product”.
That’s the motivation - it’s built into our economic model. But what is the purpose? Where is it headed?
Obviously technology enhances what mere people can do on their own, it removes the necessity for people to perform a certain aspect of a required role. Continually. Obviously again, the tendency is towards the removal of the whole role altogether.
So far, the human element in jobs has been sustained by there still being room for them to augment the role in most cases. The human requirement, when not improving technology, is ever shrunk to more and more menial tasks of smaller and smaller consequence. Some roles are even on the verge of being taken over completely, such as with drivers. This one will cause a sudden huge squeeze of people into an already squeezed job market of increasingly pointless roles, and might be the turning point.
We create technologies in order to remove the need for humans to work.
And yet the economic necessity is still stuck in “you have to have a job”. A job for a job’s sake, to uphold the individualist ideal of self-sustenance. It’s basically a modern-day sin to be unemployed, because it is perceived that government “steals” from the employed through taxation in order to provide for the unemployed. This is actually a form of the “fundamental attribution error” where one tends to attribute one’s (e.g. financial) success far more in favour of their own actions than to those of others and to one’s environment. It’s actually the economy as a whole that provides the platform for you to become rich, taxation is more like a fee for being privileged enough to take part. The more you benefit from it, the more you are in debt to it. I find the lack of gratitude of the Libertarian sort to be particularly disgraceful in this regard. There isn’t even any appreciation for the fact that provision for the unemployed goes straight back into businesses when it is spent, paying for the rich once more. It’s just channeled temporarily through other human beings first before it goes back to them. And what are we supposed to do? Let the incapable die off by denying them any income? We are more than easily able to maintain a certain level of civilisation.
And that point is an important one. Simply gaining a better understanding of economics will enable nay-sayers to see how not only is UBI necessary but there is in fact no moral or economic problem in bringing it about.
The final point may be a way off: when all work is replaced by technology. Then everyone will be unemployed. There won’t even be income to tax at this point, you may simply use the technologies at your disposal to get what you want. You’re not going to be paying machines to do what they are programmed to do, so you need no income to pay anybody with.
But how are we going to evolve to this point economically?
- The ratio of unemployed to employed is going to steadily increase simply as a matter of course. We just let our current economy do what it does.
- These increasing numbers of unemployed are going to need income for as long as there are people who want to be paid to provide a product or service.
- The money can only come from where it currently is: the employed. Therefore it must be diverted by government force unless the employed can learn to give in accordance with what our civilisation can reasonably afford.
- The money supply is going to steadily decrease, along with prices (both tending to zero) so comparative richness is going to decrease.
The only quarrel left will be how much government is allowed to take from the employed to give to the redundant - how much is “reasonable” to maintain what level of civilisation for the unemployed class (how much of a human being are they)?
On a light note, I don’t even want everyone to work - dealing with stupid employed people is annoying. Let just the best and most motivated work. There is no need for the incapable and unwilling to work, even now in my opinion.