AusHaching

How do you deal with people who are unwilling to do the work they are supposed to do? Since money is not an incentive, how do you reward people who go above and beyond working for the community?

I would assume that in a rather small community such as yours social approval/disapproval could provide a sufficient means of motivation, but I would like to hear your opinion.

Social stigma is a powerful force in small communities with selected members. It does not necessarily work as well in the world at large.

Obviously, nothing I can say will convince you. But maybe some other people can draw their own conclusions.

Let us do a bit of math, using my native Germany. Germany has a population of about 84 million people. If everyone got UBI and the payment was 1.000 € per month - which is poverty -, we need 84 billion € per month or roughly 1 trillion per year. Which is a bit less than 1/3rd of the German GDP.

But wait, you say, UBI will replace other government programs. It will not cost that much. Except that it does not. You can not replace health insurance with UBI, because health expenses can be a lot higher than 1.000 € per month. You can not replace pension payments, because people actually paid for them and are entitled to their moneys worth for the contributions they made. You can only partially replace unemployment benefits, because they can be a lot higher than 1.000 € per month. And so on.

So we are looking at maybe 800 billion € additional payments, after deducting some benefits that can be replaced with UBI. That would mean that UBI alone would increase public expediture by 50 %. UBI would cost more than ten times as much as defense and about 5 times as much as education and research.

Where would that additional 50 % of revenue come from? From taxes of course. The details would need to be discussed, but for UBI to work, the 50 % increase has to be there, so someone has to pay.

If you think that in any democracy, a 50 % increase in taxes to fund a massive redistribution program will ever be majority position, you are shockingly naive. And if it was implemented, everyone who was able to leave would leave for greener shores, because the people who actually keep the system running would not want to be bled dry.

Now you will reply that in your utopia, everything will work out fine. I just don't want to live in a country in which 70 % or more of the GDP is approriated and redistributed by the state. We had that, it was horrible, no thanks.

And not a single argument to refute my points. The costs of health care mostly happen at the end of a persons life. People willl get cancer, dementia, diabetes etc. with or without UBI. Wealthy people have higher expenditure for health care than poor ones. There is absolutely no reason to believe that UBI would significantly reduce costs of health care.

Yes, taxes do not need to be income taxes. There can be any manner of direct or indirect taxes. But there has to be a 50 % increase in total public revenue. No amount of nice words can make that fact disappear. Taxes, and especially extortionate ones, have an effect on the economy by themselves.

If your line of reasoning was right, ultra-high tax systems should outperfom those with lesser government spending ratios. There is no evidence for that, but experience indicates that there is a golden path somewhere in the middle, between France at 60 % and the US at about 40 %.

Again, let us both hope that no country is ever stupid enough to implement UBI. You can spend your life arguing for a policy that works in fantasyland and no people have to suffer the consequences.

This is a shockingly naive statement. Let us hope that your ideas are never put into practice at scale.