Universal Basic Income Is a Bad Idea
The major reason why I think UBI is a bad idea is that money is a unit of measurement, not a quantum of consumable production.  The flow of goods and services from producer to consumer is lubricated by money, not entirely controlled by it.<p>That economic fluid, like blood, has to circulate in order to be useful.  In many places, the flow is very asymmetric.  A region has natural resources, or a cultural significance, or a coincidental concentration of skills.  But for whatever reason, the value is then extracted and sent elsewhere, rather than staying in the community that produced it.  Absentee landlords take their rents and spend them in a different city.  Chain and franchise businesses send their profits to distant owners that spend their dividends and distributions elsewhere.  Worker wages are sent to families that live in another city.  Local money is spent mostly on consumables instead of development capital.<p>When owners don&#x27;t spend money where they earned it, it becomes a circulation problem.  The work that people do in their own communities is then being used to develop and improve someone else&#x27;s community.  Coal miners in West Virginia are actually digging up million-dollar houses in Washington DC metro area.  Farmers in Iowa are actually growing luxury cars in Chicago.  Software developers in New Mexico are actually launching a new live-act auditorium in Las Vegas.  All the work done, everywhere around the world, is developing mostly the places where the owners live, and those people don&#x27;t want to live in undeveloped places, even if those places are only undeveloped because all the development potential is continually sucked out to be sent to the owners.<p>So what is needed is universal basic <i>ownership</i>.  If you just dump helicopter cash onto an undeveloped area, the owners can suck harder on their rent straw until they drain away all the excess.  Live in a home you own, with no mortgage, and there are no checks being sent out of town for rent or interest.  Buy fiber-to-the-home network access from the municipality, and the service fee is not being sent to Comcast or AT&amp;T headquarters; it&#x27;s being spent on local capital and jobs.  When most of the ownership is local, it&#x27;s much easier to balance the production that the community exports with the consumables that it imports.  The only way to unbalance it from there is to make the community want more imports, without buying more of its exports.<p>That extra cash in the mailbox isn&#x27;t going to fix the economic problems inherent in locally unbalanced earning and spending.  It is only a short term fix to tax the high-ownership individuals and move the money to where it should have been spent.  It&#x27;s like performing a cardiac bypass without also attempting a lifestyle intervention with the patient.  That new flow route will work for a little while, and then it too will get clogged with calcified plaques, just like the others.  UBI treats a symptom, instead of curing the disease, which is that too few people own too much property, and thus they literally cannot spend enough in all the communities in which they own that property to keep them all healthy.