UBI often gets held up as a panacea for an "inefficient" welfare system by allowing recipients to have "consumer choice" regarding e.g. healthcare or housing.
In my and the author of the article's mind, UBI only makes sense as a form of supplementary, discretionary income. If a UBI recipient is made to trade off housing payment against health insurance payment, they're required to make a choice between two essentials; if they're both essentials, they're not really fungible in the first place.
The argument often goes hand-in-hand with greater privatization of public services, which inevitably commodifies what should be for the benefit of the public.
Trade-offs are not that binary in real life. There is a reason you do not live in the biggest house possible, you choose to forgo a bigger house to pay for other necessities.
And these marginal trade-offs are exactly what drive the normal economy - small improvements for price-conscious consumers. As much as I may agree something is essential, that doesn't mean I think it should be one size fits all or centrally allocated.
Trade-offs are that binary in real life -- for everyone who would need UBI.
If you are wealthy, you can choose to "forgo a bigger house". If you are middle-class or lower-class, the options are pretty much binary already, today, in the real world. You eat, or you don't. You have a roof over your head, or you don't. You get medical treatment, or you don't.
There's no way to "penny-pinch" , when you are already at the bottom, because all possible savings an individual could make are already priced in. Comparison-shopping isn't a choice, when you are already priced out of all but one of the options.
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Unless UBI ends up being some huge amount of money (like say, $60k USD/yr/person), there won't be any meaningful non-binary trade-offs for any of those folks to make, regardless of whether UBI happens or not.
> If you are middle-class or lower-class, the options are pretty much binary already, today, in the real world. You eat, or you don't. You have a roof over your head, or you don't. You get medical treatment, or you don't.
This is a lie. Most 'poor' Americans have lots and lots of expensive things; they could choose to do with less. This is not to say all could, but the poverty level metric is so excessive, that many have lots of discretionary spending that many 'rich' households do not.
This has to do with how we define 'poverty.' The poverty level as set means that many americans with lots of discretionary spending (for example, television) are classified as poor, despite having easily fixed overspending. For example, according to data from the department of energy (accessible here: https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2005/hc/pdf...), 26million / 39million households eligible for federal assistance (~64%) had cable television, meaning almost $70/month in unnecessary expenditure. For those below the poverty line, 10.6mil/16.6 mil had cable or satellite (again ~64%). This is data from 2005, but other years are similar.That is a bit ridiculous.
Are you choosing watching TV for $70/month as an example of an "expensive thing"? Living in poverty doesn't mean that you get should judged so harshly for mild discretionary spending to make your life less of a hellhole.
If the claim is that those living below the poverty line are going hungry (i.e., "there's no way to penny pinch when you're at the bottom", then claiming $70 (which can buy a lot of groceries) is 'mild discretionary spending' is incredibly disingenuous.
Most members of the middle class would classify it as mild spending, so I don't see anything disingenuous about my claim.
Groceries are not fungible for entertainment, and if you choose to spend a reasonable by middle-class standards amount on it you shouldn't be punished with misery and people tut-tutting at you for it.
Furthermore, I don't know what your point of revising the poverty line downwards is, apart from to tell people that they should be satisfied that their life isn't worse.
> Furthermore, I don't know what your point of revising the poverty line downwards is, apart from to tell people that they should be satisfied that their life isn't worse.
My point is that there should be various levels of poverty so comparisons can be made apples-to-apples. There is an income range where people cannot afford food, and there is an income range where people can afford food but cannot achieve a certain standard of living, etc. These need to be distinguished to make intelligent policy points.
> Most members of the middle class would classify it as mild spending, so I don't see anything disingenuous about my claim.
And many members of the upper class would say having a personal nanny is mild spending, but that seems ludicrous to literally everyone else. Luckily, my statement that 'If you cannot afford <insert basic need>, then <X> is a luxury' is a statement that could apply independent of the economic class of the speaker.
> Groceries are not fungible for entertainment,
Yes they are. I do not have cable so that I can purchase more food which I find more entertaining than vapid television shows. Also, consumeristic entertainment is not a human need. I will grant that humans need some level of entertainment. Luckily, libraries have free videos which are woefully underused. The radio is free, as is broadcast television. Also, humans have entertained themselves for literally as long as anyone can remember.
Look, the guy I replied to made a point about 'middle-' and 'lower-class' people, by claiming there's no way to penny pinch when you're at the bottom. I pointed out that, by the federal standards, those at the bottom (i.e, in poverty) are spending about $800 a year on cable (based on cable rates in my area, which may not be representative, but whatever). Thus, it seems clear that there are ways to penny pinch at the bottom. I'm not sure what is controversial about this statement. There are clearly ways to entertain oneself reasonably without cable, as I and countless others demonstrate.
> Anything that is essential (to life) should be provided by the government. Food, housing, healthcare.
Agree entirely. I'll add transportation, education and utilities to that list. (K-8 + community college, train/subway transit, water+sewer service, electricity + phone + basic internet)
> Is there anything that should not be?
Everything non-essential to basic life? Hollywood motion pictures, video games, fasion-based apparel, toys, luxury furniture, hardware, collectable cards, privately-owned books, airplanes, etc.
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This isn't a crazy idea. All of the US has a "public option" for postal mail, delivered to nearly every citizen in the nation at effectively zero profit margin. FedEx and UPS can happily exist and be wildly profitable, but they can't go too evil with their pricing or availability, because people will just switch to USPS. It keeps these private companies from exploiting everyone too much.
Similarly, most of the US has a "public option" for water, which is provided by the government to every single person in the district (regardless of income), directly at their home and at zero profit margin. You can buy "luxury water" (Bottled Dasani, Nestle, 'Culligan Man', whatever), and those private companies can happily make massive profits all day long. But these companies can't exploit the market for water too badly, because there is always a public option to fall back on and opt-out with, when these companies inevitably become evil.
Nearly every part of our society that is currently broken, is that way because it's a required purchase critical to sustain basic living, and there's no reasonable way to opt-out.
If Hasbro goes evil and prices toys at $10k each, it's fine, because I can just choose not to buy them. I don't need toys to live. In this way, their greed can be kept somewhat in-check.
But if a hospital prices the ER room at $10k, I can't opt out, or I'll literally die. If local housing market charges $10k/day rent, I can't opt out or I'll immediately become homeless and unemployable and, effectively, dead. There is no "check" on these people's greed, because all humans are required to purchase these things, just to sustain their own life. So the price can just grow indefinitely, and none of us can really directly do anything about it.
This is why public services are so vital, why it's so critical that they exist and work well and grow.
The problem is government services are generally inefficient because the motivation is welfare versus quality of service to attract more “users” (or to put it bluntly profit). It’s not run like a business and it shouldn’t be. ( I don’t think anyone would like the idea of public health program run for profit). I think the general premise of ubi being supplemental to some basic government services is an interesting thought. However I don’t think u can make government programs more efficient by throwing more money at it. The problem is not the money but the motivation when it comes to government programs.
but they're not. that's a huge misconception. public services are almost universally underfunded and almost universally more efficient than the private sector providing a similar good with similar constraints (eg, being accessible to all rather than a subset of rich people).
"public stuff is inefficient" is the worst sort of received wisdom. it's exactly propaganda by rich people who want to skim profit off of things.
This is one of those put up or shut up things. We should be able to see through trial where people actually prefer getting services from and keep what's not broken.
> "public stuff is inefficient" is the worst sort of received wisdom. it's exactly propaganda by rich people who want to skim profit off of things.
This is a VERY bad faith argument. You are assuming the only people who disagree with you are either malicious or brainwashed.
do you not assume people who disagree with you are acting in bad faith or are wrong? there are really only 3 options there. (the third being that you are in fact wrong).
anyway those choices don't exist in a vacuum and markets don't have the all-seeing empirical knowledge libertarians think they do.
Reasonable discourse dictates we assume everyone is arguing in good faith: i.e. that we are all similarly able to come to good conclusions, that we actually hold these views honestly, and we at least willing to entertain the idea that we could change our minds. If you do not believe this about a discussion, why waste time in it?
The all-seeing eye works for supermarkets all the way to the producer, it works for housing all the way to the builder, it works for cars, it works for services like garage, additional classes, etc. There is no reason people will all of a sudden be stupid when it will come to healthcare, transportation or education. Point is, competition is transitive, and the last tier is always competitive. Therefore by iteration every tier is competitive.
You can directly compare the overhead for say US 401k plans vs Social Security. Even in the US such public vs private comparisons generally favor pubic options as significantly more efficient. Replacing the VA with private insurance would cost vastly more for example.
Though public options are often heavily restricted so context is important.
In my and the author of the article's mind, UBI only makes sense as a form of supplementary, discretionary income. If a UBI recipient is made to trade off housing payment against health insurance payment, they're required to make a choice between two essentials; if they're both essentials, they're not really fungible in the first place.
The argument often goes hand-in-hand with greater privatization of public services, which inevitably commodifies what should be for the benefit of the public.