Maybe, but what do you do with people whose livelihood depend on those superfluous bullshit jobs?
Until we have a system that guarantees a right to life even if you do nothing productive, those busyworks are used to justify giving food, shelter and healthcare to those people.
There was the choice what to focus on, and we decided we wanted uncontrolled immigration. Fair choice, but the consequence is that UBI won't work anymore.
The US definitely has an immigration policy. Not to mention that no serious politician today (despite what some media outlets may claim) is running on a platform of open borders.
What are you referring to here?
I am certain that you know what I am referring to, but want to avoid a serious discussion by playing with technicalities. No thanks.
I live in a relatively small city on the island state of Tasmania, and am probably way behind on some aspects of global politics.
The US is notoriously complicated to gain entry to by legal means.
No, we didn't; US immigration is controlled both numerically and by qualities of immigrants. You may disagree with the choices of controls, but they absolutely exist.
For this crisis, people are saying, give $1000 to everyone... that money is mostly going to find its way into the pockets of already rich people, and/or those companies that should have collapsed because of bad planning, but now won't. Instead, you could legislate things like food stamps for everyone (with the government paying grocers directly, while at the same time ensuring the money isn't spent on shit like alcohol and cigarettes), and a few months of rent amnesty for everyone (including businesses) (it's not like houses will disappear if somebody doesn't pay the rent).
Either way, government money (ie. tax money) will be funnelled to, in your words, “already rich people”.
Your way is probably worse, because it forces governments to pick winners, which they are notoriously bad at doing.
This is being proposed where I live. I'm curious to know who, in this situation, pays the owners of the rental properties for the use of the house, for the expenses and maintenance, for the employees, plumbers, electricians, and contractors, etc. And what about lost profits due for the assumption of the risk of buying properties for the purpose of providing homes for people to live?
First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on.
Second, it takes a huge bureaucracy to manage and enforce controls. Folks still sell their food stamps.
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...
Indeed, and that's kind-of the point: (1) you eliminate bullshit spending (on things like alcohol, tobacco, lottery) that many people are prone to do, but that they arguably shouldn't (to some extent, those products are "predatory"); (2) it provides a minimal standard (survival) yet incentivizes people to work (be productive) to increase their standard of living (e.g. to be able to buy alcohol); (3) avoids inflation, as only a very limited set of products would be affected by increased demand (in particular, not real estate, as "free" housing would only be available in government-owned real estate) that the government can plan in advance.
My prior is that "bureaucracy" can be reduced significantly with modern IT technologies.
How do you propose to prevent people acquiring drugs, and gambling?
Whose pockets do you think it's going to come out of, whether by taxes or inflation (which is a tax on holders of dollar denominated assets). It's just doing more work for other people along the way.
Well, if America just reversed the past 3 years of tax policy, that money would come out of the pockets of the top 1%, primarily. That's people earning more than $400k a year.
As it is, we are going backwards. The government is literally borrowing money now to give money back, in droves, to rich people, instead of to poorer and middle class people.
People prefer money to buy their own food over government-issued turnips.
Because my utility function isn't the same as yours, so outside of goods and services where there is strong reason to believe that the conditions do not exist for markets to work, it's better to provide people fungible currency and allow them to maximize their own utility function through purchasing decisions rather than have a centralized bureaucracy decide what they most need. Also because despite the aforementioned variability in utility functions, agency seems to pretty consistently be positively valued, so centrally imposed selection would be inefficient in utilitarian terms even if it perfectly reflected the recipients utility function before considering agency.
There is no debt. There's only the use of "debt" and "lending" as a thinly disguised pretext for feudal tribute used for political advantage.
If we don't work through this it's going to kill us as a species.
Doing strategically useful stuff that generates invention and opportunity instead of making plastic toys that end up in landfill is a different but not entirely unrelated problem.
The WW2 debt problem in the US was managed by roughly tripling the share of the economy taken in in taxes, not just growing the economy. Taxes aren't fixed.
> Going into debt is a big problem if it eats up all of your tax revenue to service it
It's a big problem if it eats up all of your productive output; tax revenue is an arbitrarily-adjustable figure.
OTOH, if your debt is denominated in your own currency, so is (in real terms) the debt itself.
IMHO, even as a recovering laissez-faire libertarian type, the real reason for those jobs is to create funnels of money to the top of society to make a very tiny fraction of the population obscenely wealthy. The bigger scale and the glitzier the funnel, the bigger the fountain of cash for the execs to splash around amongst them. Billionaires are a mathematical anomaly, and those busywork jobs are their payment for us not decapitating the bastards like it's 1789, coupled with an absolutely stunning propaganda blitz that hoodwinked us mere techie upper-middle classers into believing they earned it, deserved it, worked hard for it. It's a lie; a lifetime is not long enough to learn 120,000 lifetimes worth of wealth, and I don't give a shit how many warehouses or webpages your minions make.
(sorry, this whole thing isn't directed at you; more like the Bezoses of the world).
Give them work in production of things people need or delivering things people need.
> system that guarantees a right to life even if you do nothing productive
How could such a system work? Wouldn't that motivate everyone to stop being productive ?