Also like, our society already does provide free food and shelter to people. All it asks is some basic niceties like “quiet after 11pm” or “don’t poop in the shower”.

I know. I’ve been homeless, been very well fed and very well protected from the elements, and well-clothed too, entirely for free.

People act like our society just lets people drop and that’s not true. We’ve got free resources out the wazoo for people.

But there are a lot of people for whom availability of resources isn’t the problem.

This is my way of saying that, even with UBI, there will be homeless people.

And conservatives will say “we give that guy $1000 a month and he sits there and shoots heroin in the park all day … I’m not giving him any more” and liberals will say “You know $1000 a month isn’t that much money and we should be offering free counseling”.

Then a decade later there will be that guy who shits on the park bench and rips smelly farts in his counseling sessions and doesn’t do the work.

As a society we’ve basically solved the problems that can be solved with free food and housing because … well because we have that as a feature of our society already,

One thing that makes UBI better than what we have now, is the fact it’s not a perverse incentive structure.

Right now all the free shit we give people is based on them “demonstrating need”. This means if they want to rise out of poverty, they need to go through a weird, unnatural zone on their work-to-benefit curve that’s flat, They do more work, and see no benefit.

Or if the program is really badly designed, it’s not just level it slopes down. Like you get a $200/mo raise, it puts you over a threshold, and you lose your $500/mo EBT benefits.

That kind of thing is toxic and evil. That’s like pushing crack on kids. Except instead of little identifiable crystals it’s at least easy to conceptualize saying “no” to, the dopamine-ruining substance is ethereal and takes the form of tables showing income thresholds in little pamphlets in government offices. Instead of a 10-second timeframe where you either hit that pipe or not, the game a person has to play with our welfare system has rounds lasting months at a time. It’s insidious and evil.

And if you’re in a position to receive this welfare, everyone on your side is encouraging you to take it.

And UBI doesn’t suffer from that mental-health-destroying, prefrontal-cortex-shrinking pattern. It’s giving with a truly open hand. It’s a ladder that doesn’t extract a price in bone density for each rung you climb.