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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.
We should be so lucky.
No, the people who run these systems will by and large be blue tribers with a few ugly and poorly thought out limits placed on their power by red tribers who are trying to make the system seem fallible because they don't like it, resulting in the worst possible implementation.
It will be means tested into a welfare cliff instead of a sliding scale because sliding scales are hard and hard cut-offs are easy. Besides, most Americans don't like to idea of just handing everyone a lump sum of cash. So everyone earning under $40,000 a year (or whatever) will get $25,000 a year in UBI, but anyone earning $40,001 will get nothing. So all jobs that pay between $40,001 and $65,000 will disappear. If UBI is not taxed as income (it won't be) then every job that pays between $40,000 and $88,500 will disappear, because why would you work a moderately demanding job for $80,000 a year and only take home $60,000 a year after taxes, when you can work a much easier job for $40,000 a year and still take home $55,000 a year after taxes and UBI. The median salary in the US is right around $60,000 a year, so that's most of the middle class incentivized right out of their jobs.
There will be a push by the red tribe to make UBI contingent on not being a criminal, which will be decried as racist, and so will either not happen or will happen in such a way as to mean that, as with all crimes, the perennial criminal underclass will be completely unaffected whereas Joe Middleclass will lose his UBI if he gets convicted of anything more serious than a parking ticket.
UBI will only work if it fully replaces every single other welfare program in the country. This will not happen. Social Security, the largest welfare program in the country, is untouchable and unkillable because every boomer thinks it's not actually welfare but rather that it's "their" money they paid in coming back to them. It is of course not their money, but try telling them that. So you say "okay Mr. Boomer we're going to give you $25,000 a year tax-free but you won't get your social security anymore" and you promptly get picketed by the AARP and voted out of office. So Social Security stays, and Medicare stays for the same reason, and Medicaid stays because if we tried to get rid of it there'd be some sob story about how a single mother of 8 children can't afford all of their healthcare on just $25,000 a year. We keep Section 8 because well obviously we can't kick these poor people out of their apartments that's just cruel, but also we can't expect them to actually get a job and budget for things like groceries and rent because that's white supremacy.
So now instead of a simple, elegant, but by necessity uncaring and socially darwinist UBI you have every single welfare program that currently exists and UBI.
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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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