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Yes, well, as long as it covers the basics somewhere. Someone living on only basic income won't be able to afford to live in Manhattan. They'll have to move to rural Alabama.

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But that's the thing: you can do that today: live minimally for a year at big-city wages, then buy a trailer in rural Alabama. If people don't consider that a viable option now, neither will they with any feasible basic income level.

Maybe you still can't live in Manhattan but I don't really see the point in a UBI so low that you can't afford to live in a city at all.

I think helping with the economic development of smaller areas would be a huge benefit in and of itself. But basic income opens up really revolutionary ideas beyond this. Imagine you get 10,000 people together and the income is set to something quite low - $1000 a month. That's $10 million a month that, if a moderate sized group of people were willing to coordinate and work together, could be used to build new cities and developments from the ground up.

In a way a basic income can almost be seen as a decentralization of government as it enables citizens to direct government funded spending at their discretion.

I had never thought about it like this. This makes so much sense.

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