At what point does the government controlling your income start to impede personal freedom?
Wouldn't any politician campaigning to increase the basic income be almost automatically elected?
Wouldn't any politician campaigning to increase the basic income be almost automatically elected?
People aren't clamoring to increase welfare because the people whom it's perceived to benefit aren't the ones who actually have the largest voting power.
People absolutely do reward politicians for securing funding for their constituents, usually in the form of earmarks, targeted tax breaks (e.g. disaster relief, geographically targeted bailouts), and stipends. In fact, it's one of the strongest predictors of support for politicians representing smaller districts.
Only at the national level (ie, when running for president) does it become problematic to be perceived as having spent Congressional funds on your own district, because the new constituency includes people who had their money "taken away" in order to provide those earmarks.
Huh? No, the point isn't what the richest people would think - they have an incentive to oppose either welfare or cash handouts. The point is that currently, welfare only targets the people with the lowest voting power, because they're both a very small bloc and also a bloc that doesn't vote very consistently in the first place. So there isn't a huge political incentive to increasing welfare.
As soon as you make that a handout that targets everyone (or appears to target everyone), you've suddenly put the largest voting bloc - those who are neither very wealthy nor on welfare - in a position where they will start to clamor to increase it more and more, because they'll see that as money flowing towards themselves.
Also I don't think it's hard to see how this thought would come about (not saying I'm advocating it). But there are plenty of ideas that would help society in general (lower college tuition) that many Americans are against whether rationally or irrationally.
If you fail to see how the American public would have a negative reaction to some kind of redistribution of wealth I think you should think about the average American's reaction to the idea of a socialist politician.
That's not it - I'm not saying that the American public wouldn't have a negative reaction to "redistribution of wealth". I'm saying that the American public has a negative reaction to "redistribution of wealth" when they don't think it benefits them. In other words, they're generally fine with wealth being redistributed from other people to them, which is most evidenced by people of all income levels usually (though not always) being on board with federal money coming in to their district. This generally takes the form of federally-funded infrastructure projects or targeted subsidies.
I'm using that to explain why people in between welfare-level poverty and comfortable wealth would have a different reaction to a stipend that (they think) is coming out of other people's tax dollars than they would to current welfare programs (which [as they perceive] don't benefit them).
The intent of basic income I have read about is to increase the personal freedom and provide a flexible safety net for the poorest individuals. And for personal freedom I'm guessing you can take or leave the basic income -- but none will because it's money right?
And about your second thought, you could use evidence for politicians elected based on their promises to raise or lower taxes -- which is essentially an income increase or reduction (for various income subsets of the population).
>Wouldn't any politician campaigning on this automatically get elected?
No, lay people would be quick to confuse this with communism. The irony of it is that this sort of a system was one of the few things Keynes and Friedman agreed should be part of public policy.
Milton Friedman did not say that this should be part of public policy, though his words are commonly interpreted very generously to imply that he did, by people who wish to demonstrate that this is a policy with "conservative support".
What Friedman actually said is that the cash value of all welfare and other support systems is greater than the in-kind value. That's a pretty narrow statement. In theory, that sounds like it's a statement of support, but it's really not. In practice, basically nobody is actually proposing doing away with all welfare, social security, government subsidies, etc., because it would be a political non-starter. Even if we scope this discussion to the context of the YC research experiment, that's plainly evident, because there's no stipulation that the participants abstain from all other forms of public assistance, as well as deduct the cash value of every other stipend and subsidy that they receive from the $1000 payment.
Comparing what Freidman wrote about to this proposal is like trying to discuss Adam Smith in the context of the political left, on the basis of the common term "liberal". Yes, there technically exists a frame of reference in which that's a meaningful comparison, but it's not a particularly useful or relevant frame of reference, and it does nothing but mislead and obfuscate the actual details of the underlying facts.
That's not true at all, and in fact, the last time a large number of economists were surveyed about a proposal, the response was overwhelmingly in opposition: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/universal-basic-income
Many economists would agree that, ceteris paribus, cash is "better" than an equivalent amount of earmarked money in most situations, because cash is more flexible. But that's a very narrow statement that isn't applicable here, because it's assuming that the set of people receiving the money would be the exact same (it's not, by the definition of "universal"), and it's also assuming that there are no other external consequences to the proposal (another topic which is, at best, debatable). So even that point of agreement among economists isn't relevant to this proposal.
I’m referring to a general principle regarding transfer payments. They’re usually more simple ways to reach a desired outcome than alternatives.
Yes, and I'm explaining that that statement isn't true (in the sense of consensus among economists) in any way that is applicable to public policies. Certainly not this one, because that's explicitly not a dichotomy being proposed - there's no tradeoff being proposed between the $1000 stipend and all of the other forms of public assistance that the participants could be or are receiving.
It's only true (in the sense of consensus) on a micro level, looking at the value to an individual of cash vs. in-kind payments, ignoring secondary factors, ignoring externalities, and ignoring positive or negative feedback. That's not a relevant framework when discussing public policy.