Not really.

The main reason libertarians like UBI more than current welfare programs, is in the hopes that it will at least get rid of administrative costs associated with other welfare programs, and by having it be universal as opposed to means based, it would hopefully avoid creating reverse incentives.

Agreed with your comments regarding the perception of a meritocracy, when the world isn't nearly that simple. I used to think it was. When I moved to the South Bronx and started spending time with people who run a non-profit children's care program there, really altered my view.

Suzzer,

Social care is massively under staffed. UBI frees us all up to become carers in our own way. I doubt we'd wanna change bedpans but is there no one in your life that you'd like to spend a bit more quality time with? There's gonna be a lot of old people out there who might not devolve fully into paranoid right wing fantasy if they had a bit more human contact and didn't have to rely on fox news. Once you expand your thinking there are so many great socially useful ways for people to spend their free time if they don't have to "work" in the traditional sense, things that are emotionally satisfying and as well as great for society.

Also imagine a world where every parent rich or poor has the freedom to spend all their formative years with their kids without having to balance a full time job. Parental involvement is one of the key indicators of academic achievement which leads to lower crime rates and all kinds of good stuff.

Man, it's weird to me that the Libertarian squad did a complete 180 from insisting that TAXATION = THEFT and the gov't should be shrunk to the size of a chickpea to now championing a colossal gov't taxation/redistribution program.

Like, if gov't forcing businesses to pay a minimum wage is tyranny, it seems like gov't forcing businesses to subsidize a minimum salary shouldn't be in the table.

I think the idea is are we going to let people starve to death in the streets en masse? No. Given that fact we need to take money from rich people (or future people via debt) and give it to poor people in some way. So lets do it in an easy and effective way. Similar with healthcare are we going to let people die if they can't afford a hospital bill? No. Therefore single payer.

If we're going to have "tyranny" (and we are) it might as well be effective tyranny. I think the true scotsman libertarians (all 6 of them) understand this.

There are a lot of lies about the administrative costs.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-me...-stamp-fundin/

(in response to Michelle Bachmann's claim that 70% of food stamp money goes to bureaucrats)

Libertarians aren't "for" this, some just consider it a better alternative to current welfare programs. All are still in favor of shrinking government to chickpea size, all still consider taxation theft.

In the same vein, I want us to cut our defense spending and use it to help poor people. Taxation is theft, LDO, but that doesn't mean we don't want that money still used as productively as possible.

Don't think of it as simply the cost of having an office to handle blahblahblah.

There's also the costs of having people applying for the benefit jump through X hoops, of thresholds where benefits get cut off providing reverse incentives.

For sure.

OK, but when the rest of us spent the past 8 years insisting that taxation is a necessary evil for a functioning society, y'all were pretty quick to insist that the idea of gov't taxation (AT GUNPOINT!!!) was acompletely illegitimate enterprise. I'm glad we're all on board with the idea of a robust, functioning federal government now.

Again, none of this is accurate. First of all, most of the people you were arguing with still maintain taxation is not a necessary evil - probably not true for most libertarians in general, they probably agree that it is a necessary evil.

But yeah, saying "I think a better use of my tax dollars is X" is not the same as saying "I think taxes are a necessary evil."

Anyways, I'm sure you understand this already.

I'm not saying we should necessarily send this woman to a gulag, but I'm also not saying we shouldn't.

In for fully automated gay space communism with dolphins

The whole discussion of automation and social welfare intersect pretty well. In the future of robots making everything for us, there's a truth than many of us are trying not to face that there will be a lot of jobs out there taking care of old people if we're willing to spend our time and money there.

There's nothing that precludes people getting a UBI from working. More people would be able to become artists if they didn't have to work a **** job to get by. Current welfare systems do much more to discourage work than a UBI would.

Probably be lots of jobs taking care of old robots too.

It's cheaper and requires a tiny fraction of the bureaucracy that a complicated web of means-tested programs require.

Maybe with your UBI you only need a part time job, wow, amazing

Is it cheaper? I get that tossing out means testing cuts out a lot of red tape, but are the savings enough to give everyone a $15k salary? I don't think there's any UBI model that doesn't require substantial tax increases on rich people and companies.

I'm in favor of the idea, but it's not gonna be cheap.

Trolly has the same brain disease that TRUMP seems to have, just on a different time scale. TRUMP stopped absorbing new information in the 80s, he assumes that everything is pretty much like it was then, inner cities are crumbling war zones, all black people know each other, cell phones are impossibly extravagant luxuries that only rich white people can possibly afford.

Trolly is like "a bunch of people who don't even post here said something on 2+2 10 years ago, now the new people posting who I have mentally put in the same box say something different, who moved my cheeeeeeese???"

It's even dumber because it's this stupid game where if "libertarians" are doctrinaire the response is "you guys should work within the existing sytsem" but if they're pragmatic the response is "you guys are sell outs".

You can implement it such that as your actual income rises you end up paying most or all of the UBI back in taxes. Money is fungible, yo.

How does UBI work for children? When they turn 18 they start getting it? Or is the U in UBI really universal, and what, it goes to their parents?

I believe, because I have seen it, that a lot of people will get sucked into an unhappy existence of just getting by - when the alternative is horrible **** like going to job interviews and starting at the bottom at a crappy job. You almost have to start out broke and afraid to push through that stuff. But it's worth it when you get to the other side.

Obviously we differ in opinion on that. Maybe we will find out someday.

I think people in our line of work need some self-awareness about how lucky we are for this to so widely be the case for us.

Didn't Ron Paul suggest people should be allowed to die in the streets (to cheers!) during the '12 primary debates? That's not a given for everyone, especially libertarians.

Right. But I'm not in that paranoid old people camp. I'm just basing this off personal experience with myself and others. Maybe my experience is an outlier.

Also kids are too helicopter-ed today as it is. In my day we had our Skinner boxes and we were happy to have them, hippie!

Follow the money. Internet libertarians aint working for no minimum wage. They are however sitting around pulling bong hits in the morning wishing they didn't have to go to work.