Quote Originally Posted by oskar View Post
I'm not saying it's the greatest possible system, but I'd be surprised if it's worse than the current one.
That may be true. Lots of legit economists (like my fave Milton Friedman) have supported UBI in some sense at some point.


I do find myself, however, scratching my head at how it could help. Here's why: if somebody is not sufficiently mentally disabled, there are jobs he can do. This assumes low enough government intervention since things like the minimum wage make it so there are a lot of people who can't work. Anyways, what I'm getting at is along these lines: there are a lot of dishwashing jobs. Nobody likes doing them and nobody stays in those positions for long (except illegals, many of whom I used to wash dishes with). If you present yourself professionally along the lines that even 80 IQ people can easily figure out, you can get a dishwashing job. They're always open because people hate doing them because they stand there for 8 hours until 2 in the morning, AND people who do them who show a modicum of work ethic pretty quickly move up in the restaurant to a cooking position.

Let's say you're at the bottom but you're not disabled. You're homeless, you have zero income, you have no family and no friends, you wear rags and you stink. Can you get a job as a dishwasher? No and yes. Not like that you can't, but what you can do is go someplace and ask for help. Churches still do this, but they used to a lot more. Government has been crowding them out. Regardless, every lifestyle homeless person knows of places where they go where people relish at the opportunity to help them. If you're homeless and penniless and you need a shower and a shave and an outfit so you can put in some dishwashing applications, there are a lot of people who will help you do that. In fact, a lot of the people who already help with that stuff will likely already have contacts to get you working.

But most people at the bottom don't want to do that because the government provides them property to sleep on and live on, food to eat, amenities to entertain themselves with.