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A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income (theoutline.com)
Economists Djavad Salehi-Isfahani and Mohammad H. Mostafavi-Dehzooeifrom for the Economic Research Forum have released a new report on the results of a basic income scheme launched in Iran in 2011. "In 2011, in response to heavy cuts to oil and gas subsidies, Iran implemented a program that guaranteed citizens cash payments of 29 percent of the nation's median income, which amounts to about $1.50 every day (about $16,000 per year in the U.S.)," reports The Outline. Here are the key findings: The report found no evidence for the idea that people will work less under a universal income, and found that in some cases, like in the service industry, people worked more, expanding their businesses or pursuing more satisfying lines of work. The researchers did find that young people -- specifically people in their twenties -- worked less, but noted that Iran never had a high level of employment among young people, and that they were likely enrolling in school with the added income. The evidence presented in the paper is compelling, but the anecdotal belief that handing people money will make them lazy is hard to shake. "The findings in this paper do not settle this question," the report's authors point out. "What we have accomplished is at the very least to shift the burden of proof on this issue to those who claim cash transfer [sic] make poor people lazy, and to show the need for better data and more research."
It seems obvious that if people can do something they will, but what? Who knows. Hobby or Job, or accidental community service via picking up trash.
I would work less if I didn't have to work for my income. Am I the only one?
per year extra hell yah I'd still work (Mind you I own my own business) but still $1200 extra per month is a lot of money to do things lots of people wouldn't be able to do other wise. Hell with $1200 extra I could use that to run a second online business.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The argument against basic income is not about laziness, it's where the money comes from. Gather 5 of your friends and implement basic income. Those who earn less than the BI gets paid by money collected from those who earn more than the BI. Post back the results. Do it among 10, 20, or 30 of friends, all without the need for any government or politicians. Good luck.
then I'm sure it'll work everywhere else in the world.
After all, Iran is just like every other country in the world.
Now we are supposed to base public policy based on data Iran collected?..
But, hey, why not try this in Venezuela now? Surely, Maduro will listen to the foreign fans of Bolivarian revolution...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
it's basically 4 trillion dollars so they would have to double the federal budget to pay for this. Bare minimum, everyone's tax rate doubles. This is based on total outlays vs total income. Remember that FICA is just another source of income for the feds, an effective ~15% tax before any income tax is considered. Then there is all the excise, corporate, etc taxes. It's easy to say they can get the money, but there are not enough rich people to just stick with the bill. It will land on the middle class like every other tax increase does and we will be stuck with a standard of living much closer to those on universal basic income.
Rich are fine and the middle class gets their standard of living dragged far closer to those on UBI. It is a fact that the rich can not pay the bills, they are too large. The middle class will be the ones who pay for this.
Slashdot headline reads "A New Report Finds No Evidence That People Will Work Less Under a Universal Basic Income" yet quoted in the article "The researchers did find that young people - specifically people in their twenties - worked less"
Sooo... yea. I realize Slashdot has become a new social justice platform but c'mon, this is at least the third universal basic income propaganda post of the week and it's certainly stretching the boundaries of legitimate.
If anything, employers will need to raise salaries, since potential employees will have less incentive to work.
Employers would need to get better in all parts. When the populace no longer fears for their lives upon losing their job, they would be far more apt to quit a shitty job to find something better. Over a generation or two it'd weed out bad businesses, making the country more efficient with higher quality output and faster economic growth.
But I don't know what I'm talking about. Walmart would probably find a way to game the system like do currently.
I acquired a passive income 15 years ago that was roughly equivalent to a UBI. I left my job and let someone else have that income while I developed a new business that I never could have built otherwise. Awesome result with one big caveat: After 10 years my passive income started looking less secure and I suddenly realised I'd been kidding myself about how hard I'd been working. I doubled my productivity instantly.
I had become less productive with a guaranteed income, but even so the effort has given our community a new business that brings in tourist dollars.
May be the perfect formula doesn't actually require 40 hours per week. Maybe we can afford for most people to be a bit less productive (call it more lazy if you like).
I say we should give UBI a try - at least throw a moderate budget into some more thorough research.
Socialism has nothing to do with Venezuela and you damned well know it. Maduro is NOT a socialist. He's a corrupt dictator who is tearing down the socialist constructs of that country. In other words, as usual, it is another case of conservative authoritarians who are fleecing the country. Reason: CORRUPTION! Human Nature!
What's it matter if people work less due to UBI? If a UBI is implemented due to automation permanently displacing jobs at a faster rate than new jobs can be created, then it would be expected that people would be working less. Even if that's not the case, it's not necessarily due to laziness. Many old people who would/should be retired, find work because their retirement savings/pension/social security payments are inadequate for their lifestyle (or any lifestyle, potentially.) Others are effectively disabled, alcoholic, or otherwise 'can' work but only at great disadvantage, generally through no fault of their own; many of these people are considered unemployable. Others aren't disabled but have some medical issue (arthritis etc.) that causes great pain doing any work; some people hurt standing for long periods of time, or can't sit still for long periods of time. Are these people 'lazy'? If so, does that mean they deserve to starve to death in the gutter?
As easy, unambitious jobs go away, layabouts won't suddenly rise to the occasion and gain some professional skills; they'll complain that there's no jobs, and continue being leeches (usually, on their family and friends.) In reality I don't think many of these people exist, they tend to either a) do odd jobs, or bounce from job to job constantly, or b) are low-grade criminals, petty thieves et cetera. In both cases, it probably costs society less to just hand them some money to leave the rest of society alone.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
You've got cause and effect backwards. People largely abuse drugs and alcohol to cope with things like their shitty jobs.
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The drastic reduction in desperate workers gives employers less leverage.
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I think you're thinking of welfare. You still get your full UBI regardless of how much money you make, dramatically increasing the incentives to work.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why though? The idea of UBI is that it doesn't change if you get paid for a regular job. You'd get your UBI plus whatever you earn for working.
I guess you could say you're getting out of paying taxes, but how is that any different from the current system where you work at a job and pay taxes on that income? There's no additional incentive from the existence of UBI specifically. I suppose you could argue that payroll taxes are needed to fund it, but that's a big assumption, and many of the cases for UBI assume it's coming from something else (since it often comes in scenarios where there just isn't enough work/jobs for everyone due to automation or such).
Except that one big problem with our current welfare system is that if you work, you lose welfare benefits, and this creates a disincentive against working. A Universal Basic Income would come with no such restrictions.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
There was no evidence that people who got paid some cash allowance didn't work, except for the age group where the amount was material (the young).
That's quite a different conclusion than the headline would suggest.
That right there is the fly in the ointment. Simply working isn't enough. You have to do work producing something other people want, not necessarily what you want. Work has value because it produces something other members of society are demanding. If a UBI allows you to quit a productive job in order to start an unproductive one (e.g. artist), the net result is that the country's productivity decreases, and the standard of living drops. (Which means the UBI has to be increased to keep it at the level of "basic", starting a vicious cycle of continuing productivity declines and UBI increases.)
As an extreme example, nobody wants to collect garbage, repair toilets, clean septic tanks, etc. But because it's needed, society pays a lot for it - enough to entice some individuals to live with the stink and do it for a living. If a UBI causes some of these people to quit and take up more "satisfying" lines of work, the prices of these services will go up, resulting in less income available for people to spend on other things, resulting in the UBI not buying as much as it used to, resulting in the government increasing the UBI to compensate for its decreased purchasing power, resulting in more people switching to more "satisfying" work, resulting in more prices going up, etc.
The economy wants to price things according to how much society values it. Attempting to thwart that with a UBI or minimum wage doesn't make that tendency disappear. The economy just interprets that as damage to the system, and routes around it - by devaluing the currency to lessen the impact of the fixed value of the UBI or minimum wage on prices.
"What we have accomplished is at the very least to shift the burden of proof on this issue to those who claim cash transfer [sic] make poor people lazy,
No you/they haven't. Burden of proof to support a costly program or scheme does not work that way: You have the burden, and your concept doesn't have merit until you've proven it ---- showing a little bit of evidence doesn't change the burden of proof to someone else's. The burden of proof remains to show that Universal Basic Income provides more value than it costs in order to justify this radical scheme.
As for the evidence that providing Food or resources without having to work for it promotes Laziness or failing results ---- the strong exemplars of this happening are readily available throughout history. Communism/Socialism to any degree reduces production and doesn't create sustainable economies; history's littered with numerous examples...
Oh please. I made no such allusion at all. Using your logic, we have a panel of dictators here in America. They're called The House, The Senate, and the Supreme Court (and we don't even get a choice with these judges). That is ridiculous. The raiding of the state's coffers is the issue. And I mean actual raiding, as in stealing. Taxes, entitlements, subsidies, etc are not stealing. That is wealth that is recirculated in the general economy. I mean when people like Maduro take the money and buy themselves a new mansion or a yacht or whatever. That is to the benefit of a single person as opposed to the general welfare of the nation.
Also please explain how the following sentence is not correct: "The Right's target, and the dictator's target, is always the same: "Here's something that takes precedence over individual rights"." I'm 40. The right has never, not once, given the people any individual rights as you claim. Name one. They're always taking them away. We've been sliding into said hell here in the US and its worst incarnations so far (cause it started way earlier) are because of the Patriot act. That was a Republican thing. All the stuff conservatives bitch about the Dems doing have been proven time and time again to be exactly what they are doing themselves. Guilty dogs bark and they bark a lot and loudly. Keep barking so we know where you guys are, ok?
yea becouse I'd believe anything coming out of Iran ... not. /. is really stretching here.
Right. I mean, they probably even disregard the scientific method and still fight over things like whether global warming and evolution are real.
Real lawyers write in C++
... also another major point is that Venezuela has had an unprecedented drought that's stuck since 2013. That's not hard to check out, and it's crippled agriculture. Coupled with the sustained drop in oil prices, these two factors have in fact devastated food production and imports simultaneously.
The other side of the coin is in fact a thing called "price controls" and those aren't necessarily a socialist measure, they're a tactic used by many governments when inflation is getting out of hand. This is the really big mistake Maduro made. Price controls cause a discrepancy between the official price and the black market price, leading to hoarding and speculation, which causes further inflation, and necessitates rationing of the controlled-price good, thus leading to long queues. The insidious thing about price controls is that they *create* shortages even if there's plenty of production, because they can create a speculative bubble in the price-controlled asset.
The system is actually closer to what central Europe has than what's going on in Venezuela. And we're currently stress testing whether the system works when thousands over thousands of people flock into it...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Saying that the "greater something" is more important than individual rights is leftist now? "You are nothing, your people is everything" and all that?
Wow, and they told me at school that Fascism was a right wing ideology...
Please understand finally that extremism wants to take your liberties. Left or right doesn't really matter here, any extremist ideology puts the ideology over your personal freedoms.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The thing is, people whop work just to get money to fund an addiction are most likely working jobs that are going to be gone anyway in the next couople of decades. That is, someone working a warehousing or a fast food job just to be able to afford booze is not going to be able to find work in the future regardless because automation is already making such jobs obsolete and is only going to keep going.
Bullshit. The very poiint of this story for example is to point out that the people who can work will not work any less under UBI because you still get more money if you work rather than just being on the UBI. The incentive to work if you can and those raise your standard of living is still there,
Ah, this argument again. I live in Finland, you know, one of those 'socialist' that offers free healthcare and education with tax money. We have an extensive welfare system already and are also trialing UBI to replace/modernize the wellfare system to make it more flexible. Other countries that have similar systems include but are not limited to: sweden, norway, denmark, Germany, France, etc And last I checked, the US has a social security system also funded by taxes.
There's some sort of weird american myopia, in which the only alternatives seem to be an massive oligarchy á la Russia or modern day US where the top 0,1 % is doing insanely well, the next 9,9 % are doing alright and then the middle and low-income classes are going down, or a 3rd world hellhole. This is just one giant strawman and the age old 'no social policies can ever work because the soviet union' -argument which is utter BS. The advanced European economies have been working as de facto socialist states for the better part of half a century, yet somehow conveniently we are always ignored in these conversations even though we've been far more successful in the implementation of these policies than the 3rd world countries that you just listed. We outperform the US in basic education and health, people are happier, there's less violent crime, less corruption etc. Quoting the study on happiness:
But sure, keep looking at Venezuela if it makes you feel good.
We have both a capitalistic system (a capitalistic economy does not prevent strong social policies) and a multi-party representational democracy. And if I had to choose, I'd much rather stay here (on in any other
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
It is 6.5% of GDP. Current US Social Security is ~5% of GDP. In other words, it is not much more than is being spent right now.
You're totally ignoring the inflation that would happen when people suddenly have this "extra" money.
You still get your full UBI regardless of how much money you make, dramatically increasing the incentives to work.
No, because employers don't want to dramatically increase the incentives. They are getting enough employees with the current system, so with UBI, they can lower the wages, and still get enough people.
*Whoosh*
They're not talking about "incentives from employers". They're talking about the personal incentive ("incentive (n): something that incites or tends to incite to action or greater effort, as a reward offered for increased productivity.") to work. Aka, under most welfare systems, there's a "welfare cliff" where if a person works more, their income actually drops as they lose their benefits - and thus there's a disincentive to work past that cliff. Under UBI, there is no such cliff - the more you work, the more you earn.
It's a serious issue. A lot of people who are on benefits for various physical or mental disabilities have "marginal" ability to work. Many want to work, but are afraid that if they take on a job, lose their benefits, and then it ultimately turns out that their condition prevents them from fulfilling the job requirements (a very real risk), that they'll be screwed. It keeps a lot of people who might actually be able to work out of the job marketplace for no good reason.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
and that they were likely enrolling in school with the added income
That single line torpedoes their entire "study". To rephrase the article summary in more honest words: "we found that people did work less, but we're just going to assume that they're going to school instead".
You can prove anything you want when you're willing to hand-wave away any data you don't like.
Because your drinking may cause you to lose your shitty job, or the stress/boredom of not being able to move forward socially or accomplish goals can drive you to drinking. Hence, why alcoholism and opioid addiction are often found in towns where industry has died.
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And you know what the Tories and other good and faithful followers of our divinely-appointed King called those people back then? LEFTISTS!
Actually, no. The Left/Right thing came about as a result of the French Revolution more than 10 years afterwards. Literally, your political leanings determined whether you sat on the left side of the French legislative chamber or the right side. The term "Right" has nothing to do with being right, or of Rights.
The USA was founded in a time when every civilized country had, By Grace of God, a King. They were to the conservatives of the day what Communists were to the Captains of Industry in the 20th Century.
Please understand finally that extremism wants to take your liberties. Left or right doesn't really matter here, any extremist ideology puts the ideology over your personal freedoms.
Thank you. Glad to see someone gets it.
People like to say that the whole R/D thing is just like sports, where you cheer your own team and boo the other one.
But in sports, you're not rooting for the complete, total, and eternal annihilation of the other team. You play the game, you win or lose, no hard feelings (well, not many) and you come back again for a rematch. And again next season. The team is important, but the game is everything.
Ideology is a game for idiots. And far too many people are obsessive players.
Why are you still talking as if the GP was talking about employer-provided incentives when the GP was very clearly talking about personal incentives? It's almost looking as if you were trying to make a point about something else and decided to inject it into the conversation here because someone used a word you felt you could chain off of.
And yes, low-end wages can be expected to go down with UBI - as they should. Minimum wage should disappear, because it's just one of the many pieces of a patchwork currently in use to approximate a UBI. In turn, corporate tax rates can rise (compensating for the windfall to employers for not having to pay as much), in turn helping pay for the UBI.
That said, your notion that people would tend to only try to work up to $1200/mo take-home income (far below the US poverty line) is silly. And contradicted by the study that forms the basis of this Slashdot article.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
There are also certain sectors of the population where, with enough children, a person simply MAKES more off welfare and benefits than they could possibly make off even a decently paying job.
And it's seeing cases like this that we know welfare for the truly broken system it is.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
But what would happen in an UBI system with someone who gets the same amount of children ? Would they starve, because the UBI level is fixed ? If that is what we want, we can simply remove the welfare payouts for extra children.
Salaries will drop, such that the personal incentives for work stay just as modest as they are now.
Not necessarily. Salaries will only drop if people are willing to work for less, which is not a given. A possibility equal to your scenario is that, with UBI place, people who feel more secure when employment lapses will not be willing to work for less and will demand more. Also possible, as the article alluded to, is people who feel they are not offered high enough wages may be more able to seek education or training so that they can move into a new job market that pays more, which would put upward pressure on wages. Markets are complicated.
First flaw: Ignoring how money gets into the system to pay out a UBI for 330 Million people. Print more like the Weimark Republic which ends up with collapse due to inflation (takes more than the current GDP of the USA to pay a basic living wage to the populace) or tax the producers. The latter already happens at a staggeringly high rate and we can't pay our current bills.
The idea of UBI has been around for at least 70 years and nobody has seen any working models. You already hinted at hating reality, but numerous countries in Central and South America have started out with that ideal and quickly turned into tyrannical authoritarian regimes. You need guns to take from those that have and give to the poor.
Please save your Finland is great arguments. I work with people who worked very hard to leave Finland, which is basically a caste system. There is no social or economic mobility in Finland. Finland in theory should be much easier to control since it's population is less than many cities in the USA. Where is Finland's great UBI program? If you can't and won't do it, why should we?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Standard method in science is to stay narrow, not alter protocol midway through investigation or research.
But that's exactly what this conclusion does. The question the study was looking into was "do people work less when given a universal basic income". They looked at the data, and saw that the answer was "yes". Instead of saying "yes, UBI does decrease how much people work" they said "no it doesn't, but, like, it does in this one group over here, but, um, we're going to assume that's because they're going to school".
It begs a study into THAT question
Yes, absolutely, that should be looked into. But whether or not a followup study occurs doesn't change the fact that this study showed that UBI does in fact lead to people working less on average. Isolating one specific group in order to turn a "yes" into a "no" is inherently dishonest.
That doesn't seem supportable. Many towns with factory work have alcohol and opioid abuse problems; and many employers allow their employees to just not come to work high. I've known people who were sent home for shitting their pants while high on heroin.
Much of the time, the people with the lowest incomes or the greatest difficulty sustaining employment end up with substance abuse problems. Conversely, people with high addiction potential--those with alleles encoding delta-FosB more-readily in rewards responses--tend to not get their addictions under control until they stabilize their employment and personal lives, even when their employment is the same shitty factory job as habitual abusers.
The brain tends to follow the lowest-energy actions, such that the reflexive impulses formed in the midbrain occur without interruption. To override this, one must formulate new intent in the prefrontal cortex, then apply pressure via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Once the dlPFX is exhausted (ATP, neurotransmitter stores), self-control becomes difficult, and stress becomes a motivator.
Behavioral trends in population strongly suggest poverty is more-stressful than routine shitty employment. You suggest only a parallel construction.
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Pretty much, although its more about addressing the fact that 75% of current jobs are going to get wiped out by automation, and that automation is not going to create 75% new jobs. Basic presumptions about how the capitalist system needs to be re-examined, including whether the threat of survival is required in order for capitalism to function (I seriously doubt that).
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I obviously can't speak for that person, but I can theorize why that might still be a rational choice. There are quite possibly more factors at work. She could have had more expenses associated with being employed such as childcare that narrowed the actual benefit of that earned income. She could also have just decided that the extra cost of a higher rent made the work not worth doing. Even at that low level of wages taxes and such can easily chew up 25% of the pay check, and while some of that will come back at the end of the year as a tax return that's a long term factor. The rent going up cuts the real gain from being employed in a big way.
I know in my case I've seen job offers that would have resulted in slightly higher pay. I turned them down because if I'm going to jump ship it had better be for a significant raise. When it comes to my free time I value it even more than my work hours and am willing to pay others significantly more than I earn per hour to do tasks I hate. I can easily see how someone might have enough income from passive sources to not require working for more, even if it might provide for an improvement that you or I might say is worth it.
Your statement is absolutely false, and has no basis in reality. Money does not "fix" addiction, and proof is simply looking at the long list of addicts who are/were extremely wealthy. How about Jimi Hendrix, Bon Scott, John Bonham, Kurt Cobain, or Whitney Houston? Don't like musicians, how about politicians like Rob Fort, Senator Crapo, or Marion Barry? Drugs are not good enough? How about alcohol like Ted Kennedy? How about Porn/Sex like Anthony Weiner? You should be able to do your own research from here, and find that money certainly does not fix addiction.
Thank goodness you are not a psychologist!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Good answer Comrade! But then why did China and Russia stagnate for many decades in terms of both production and innovation while the US became the biggest innovator the world has ever seen? Why did China have to move to a partial market economy to promote innovation and productivity, instead of pushing out a bigger and better UBI program than the world has ever seen? Why did Russia also move to a partial market economy to promote innovation and productivity?
The "hard wired producers will always take it up the ass" thought process is a fabrication and fantasy!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You dont understand what UBI is. UBI is not promising prosperty for all, it is promising the basics (literally the "B" in the acronym). People have to give up all their liberties under UBI? You're just making up undesirable atributes for UBI now. What liberties would be lost under a policy of UBI?
You also decided to completely ignore my point that the failed states you mention used COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SYSTEMS and then you just repeated yourself. UBI is the same as these failed state communist policies because they both try to help people? Are apples the same as oranges because they're both food? What about social security, public education, public roads or any one of hundreds of other policies that exist to help people that exist in every successfull country in the world?
There are no negative examples for UBI because there are literally no examples of UBI in any form of meaningfull practice.
Your only valid point is that there are no positive examples of UBI which certainly does not mean it's doomed to failure as it is an untested idea. It only means it is not garunteed to succeed which I would certainly agree with.
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Part of the problem is that once you get a job benefits stop entirely. So if you don't get a job that pays enough, you're better off not working at all.
We could fix this by simply having benefits reduce in accordance with income rather than having them cutoff entirely.
I'm going to call shenanigans. The EIC is part of your tax return. Your employer has nothing to do with the payments.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
Depends. You suffered because the Navy retirees had extra money coming in and you didn't. With a UBI, everyone would have the extra money coming in. (Yeah, we need to make provisions for non-US citizens here.) On the other hand, nobody's forced into a crap job instead of homelessness and starvation, so the crap jobs will likely pay more.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Lots of the money that would go into the UBI already comes out of taxes. This would remove the need for normal welfare benefits, for example, and would cover a lot of what Social Security does (including disability). The additional money would require raises in taxes. At some income, the extra taxes would take away all of the UBI, and people at higher incomes would lose some money.
On the other hand, we could save nearly a trillion a year by adopting the next most expensive health care system in the world, so it's not like we're spending money wisely anyway.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Properly designed, everyone collects a UBI, except for the people in the 1% who actually earns so much money, they're the one's paying taxes to support UBI.
The 1% don't have enough wealth (let alone income) to pay for a meaningful UBI for the remaining 99%, even if you confiscated all of it—which would be obviously self-defeating unless you could somehow stop that wealth from fleeing the country the moment the proposal was seriously considered. More realistically it would be the upper 50-70% paying extra taxes so that the rest can receive a net increase in income, with the majority of the funding coming from the middle class. If you're above the median already you shouldn't expect UBI to raise your income. (The advantage to you would simply be that you are guaranteed the UBI even if your current income source dries up, which may open up more options for seeking better employment, or at least a greater sense of security.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
They're wrong. They invalidated their own research by disregarding the results they specifically said:
"The researchers did find that young people -- specifically people in their twenties -- worked less, but noted that Iran never had a high level of employment among young people"
BR> Taking from the productive and giving to the non-productive and did not earn it, is STEALING, and to a lesser extent, slavery, no matter what "moral face" you paint onto it.
To lay claim to the fruits of a person's labor and life/time is the exact definition of slavery. You're claiming ownership of THEM and their labor, which equates to their time, which equates to the product of their entire being... their life, which everyone only has a finite amount of. This kind of fascist utopian bullshit makes me SICK.
UBI = Slavery on a mass scale by the government/powerful. PERIOD.