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I think this is precisely the reason that we're unlikely to see UBI, even if we somehow reach a post scarcity society.
The 'U' in UBI means 'Universal'. It means that people will receive it even if you don't like them. There's a portion of the population who absolutely will not accept that. Unfortunately, they're also the loudest and have enough energy and free time to end up in positions of power when any program that calls itself UBI will be enacted. Think of a bad HOA committee, granted the power to decide whether or not you'll live in an apartment or starve to death in a gutter.
Everything will be means-tested. Everything will be revocable if you commit a crime. Everything will be contingent. The definition of those things will change every time new hands are on the levers of power.
We'll see political graft and handouts, but not UBI.
I tend to disagree with this. Consider Social Security; Unemployment Insurance; etc. While it's true that there were laws passed in the 1950s to deny social security to communists, there is ample precedent from the last 50 years (in the form of tradition) to make these programs more or less universal, at least in terms of ideological restrictions.
I haven't seen any efforts among Wokies to deny these sorts of benefits to Racists or Misogynists or whatever. Probably they would try to do it if they had total control of the US executive, legislative, and judicial branches. But without that? It's hard for me to see.
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Absolutely. Look at the cancellation phenomenon: The faction who "believes" that health care, food, and housing are human rights, the first thing they go after if you oppose them is your job, the means by which you attain your health care, food, and housing. It rather exposes the whole game - they don't want state control of these things in order to ensure that everyone has them, they want state control over these things in order to ensure they are given to their friends and denied to their enemies. This is by far the biggest argument in favor of totally eliminating the welfare state.
Eh... The general thrust of your post is right, but it's at least as much an argument for denying assholes political influence. That's impossible under genuine democracy, but there are other systems.
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Who exactly do you have in mind?
Graft and identity-based handouts are still more likely, but that’s because they are definitionally cheaper than universal handouts.
I have a hard time shaking the idea of it being tied to something like a Chinese social credit score, but American and worse.
The theoretical American commitment to liberty makes them unable to say 'we want to reward patriotic and pro-social behaviour' so they end up finding weird and awful metrics for it.
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I’ve been thinking about regular credit scores a lot, recently. I am 100% willing to believe that lenders would love to expand it.
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