Okay, so, this is a topic I see come up quite often among both craplibs and socialists, with it being a seeming favorite of socialists in particular (let's face it the welfarists aren't cool enough to support even this). Essentially, people criticize basic income, for a variety of reasons. Either basic income won't provide for peoples' needs, and giving people money just means inflation goes up and rent goes up, or people won't spend the money properly. Either way, they argue basic income won't solve the problems that it is intended to solve, and we cannot leave these problems to market based interactions. Therefore, we need to provide these services to people directly. Instead of giving people money for food, we need to give them food. Instead of giving them money for housing, we need to give them housing.
Okay, so, forgive me for being snarky, but you want to know what that sounds like? COMMUNISM! And I mean that in the pejorative way that most Americans think of when the term comes up. Look, when the average American has to describe communism and what makes it so unappealing it's this. It's essentially this all powerful leviathan of a government that controls who gets resources and what resources peole are entitled to. It robs people of their freedom. You don't get to choose where you live, the government gives you a house and that is that. You don't get to choose what you eat, the government gives you food and that is that. This opens the door to all sorts of abuse. What if you don't like the food, or the housing? Well, tough crap. That's what you're entitled to. Deal with it.
In a more capitalist society, with welfare, it would take on a particularly cruel approach. Basic income is intended to remove the stigma of welfare. By giving people money rather than stamps or tokens to specific goods and services, it puts everyone on equal ground, there is no stigma associated with getting a UBI, because everyone gets it. Basic services would implement a two tiered system where stigma still exists, and the worst goods and services will be given to the poor in order to ensure they remain miserable in order to coerce them to work. So basic services could be used to go against indepentarian ideals in order to force them into the labor market. We already see this happen in Theresa Funiciello's book, "The Tyranny of Kindness", which describes how poor and inferior goods and services given to the poor often are. Scott Santens read some chapters of the book here, and I feel it's relevant to post it.
Another problem is how basic services would lead to welfare traps. Say the government gives you a house. Say you get a job and want to move? Well, now you gotta move out and rely solely on your own income, recreating the problem UBS was intended to solve in the first place. You can phase out a UBI with taxes or clawback mechanisms, but what does the government do when you can start to stand on your own two feet? Give you half a house? UBS will inevitably lead to the same welfare traps that exist in welfare, and is a huge reason why it's just a bad policy. Look at how flawed the ACA's approach to healthcare is, where if you're poor you can get medicaid, and then there's a gap for people just above that who can't realistically afford insurance and healthcare, because they're not poor enough to get government aid, but too poor to actually afford it, well, that's what these kinds of schemes encourage. And this actually does discourage positive incentives to work, leaving nothing but the stick approach welfare often imposes on people.
If you give this stuff to everyone regardless of income okay that solves that problem, but now we're back to the government telling everyone what they can and can't consume again. And having two systems could be wasteful as well. Why should you buy your own food if you don't like the government's food? Should you get a tax refund if you don't take the government's food? Gee, wanna know what that sounds like? A UBI in a way. So why not just give people UBI? It's just a stupid, complex, bureaucratic system.
Now, to be fair, I'm not an ideologue on this subject. I feel like capitalists and socialists all get in their respective camps and fail to see nuance. You have individualist capitalists who believe the market is the solution to everything and therefore everything must be privatized. This is harmful. There are industries that are fundamentally broken when subject to a for profit market model. Healthcare, education, and childcare are a few of these. I don't support market everything. I obviously support some level of "universal basic services" for all, but generally speaking only for industries that are broken and face market failures. Housing is a tricky one since I obviously don't believe in it being a "universal basic service", but I also understand it's a market failure and a tricky subject.
On the flip side, you got people who don't believe in capitalism, or markets at all, and believe they're categorically bad and that socialism is a categorical good. These guys are just as naive and stupid in my opinion. I don't believe we should have some sort of centralized command economy where the government determines what everyone gets. Government suffers from the economic calculation problem for one, and for two, a government that powerful can easily be corrupted. I mean, our current government is corrupted and I don't trust their motives half the time anyway. I support some government run services, but I try to thread the needle in a way where I'm collectivist where I need to be while still supporting individualism and freedom. It's the essence of being a left libertarian.
That said, I'm going to have to say I'm a hard no on "universal basic services". We should have a UBI along side a handful of universal services like medicare for all, free college, and universal childcare. That's the best approach. A command economy is just as bad or worse than privatized everything. Using facts rather than pure ideology is a better way to approach this subject.
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