the purpose of the police is to protect the rich from the poor. what this guy is saying is delusional.

it's not that the universality isn't an ideological feature - i get it, and i don't disagree. at all. but, this guy is supposed to be an economist, so he should fully realize that a universal hand out in this sense will just produce inflation. and, then you've converted your universal right to income security into yet another government handout for the rich.

the idea behind this ought to be to maximize positive liberty and give people a way out of the labour market if they truly want one, without forcing them into abject poverty. ideally, this will even boost wages by restricting the amount of labour participation. so, everybody wins, in the end. but, the only way to make sense of it is to make it look like a negative income tax - and peg it to something like 75% of the minimum wage.

this whole "disincentive to work" thing gets the supply & demand curve upside down, and i'd guess it's because the curve has flipped over, at least in rich countries. that's a big part of why you had this middle class develop in the rich countries - because there was more work than there workers. capital consequently had to incentivize people to work, in order to maximize productivity. but, nowadays you have the opposite - there are way more workers than there are jobs, and that's just increased with globalization and mechanization. now, we have this natural unemployment rate, and this reality that there are always going to be unemployed workers, no matter what. there's consequently no longer any good reason to incentivize work; rather, if you're looking at it from a labour perspective, you actually want to give people incentives to exit the labour market so they aren't deflating the price of labour by instigating a race to the bottom. so, you can pull the rug out from that argument entirely by pointing to changes in the labour market. but, the point about inflation remains, and it appears that he's not even addressing it.

people don't really need an "incentive to work", anyways. we're all going to want to do some kind of work. what you used to need was an incentive to participate in wage work. but, like i say - that is flipped over. capital no longer needs such a thing, at all.

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see,  this is the kind of goofy argument you expect from an arts major, not a professor of economics. if you fund a ubi with corporate & property taxes,  the rentiers will just increase rents to offset it. in the end, the government generates more revenue, and those that own debt benefit, but the poor just have the money they're given clawed back by the rentier class that you're taxing to redistribute to them. so, this is a handout to the rich, not a handout to the poor.

i understand that it is perceived that a ubi is politically unworkable unless it's truly universal, but it just doesn't actually work unless you target it.

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the other thing is that it is easy to predict that if you design systems where you're giving money to people without robust government id, databases of imaginary people will start appearing out of nowhere, and money will be directed into slush funds controlled by politicians and their buddies in the corporate sector. it's an algorithm for corruption.

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and he cites hayek but i actually think friedman got this specific idea better than almost everybody, in framing it as an escape from the market. right-libertarians are all about allowing individuals to make choices, and if you like markets and want to live in a market economy and have the capital to participate then the freedom of such a system is quite apparent, but markets are in truth tyrannical systems of vicious collectivism if you have no interest in participating in them. give friedman a little bit of credit in realizing the contradiction, there, and presenting a negative income tax as a way to escape the tyranny of forced marketization.