[DemocracyFTW2]

The people who have more than most by orders of magnitude will never tire in their attempts to convince everyone that (1) without their participation (rule) everything will break down; (2) without their philanthropy (self-serving monetary arrangements using tax-exempted entities they fully control) everything will break down; (3) giving people a modicum of pecuniary independence will cause an immediate collapse and everything will break down. Meanwhile they advocate for a draconian surveillance-based system because, as you can see, everything is breaking down. QED.

[lunar-whitey]

This is why I question the article’s premise. There is no risk of liberal democracies implementing a UBI that supports anything beyond subsistence. Most people in developed countries will want more than that.

The biggest issue I see with UBI is that the rates could be set below the cost of living and used as justification to eliminate all other support programs, as was feared the Nixon administration would do when it proposed a negative income tax in the late 1960s. Different solutions are still needed for the small subset of the population that cannot limit spending to necessities when required.