[ExI] Income and services for the underemployeed or unemployed

[Fred C. Moulton]

I am changing the Subject since "plebeians" often has an implication of
inferiority and that is not what this is about.

On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 11:52 +0930, Emlyn wrote:
...
> 
> Since I wrote that, I feel more convinced that universal income
> doesn't quite solve the problem that it wants to solve. In particular,
> people get into debt, so easily! A lot of people with newfound
> universal income will immediately swap it, as balancing debt, in
> perpetuity, for some frivolous short term gain (extra cash, a holiday,
> a big car?). Of course individual choice is good, but you know this is
> going to happen en-masse almost immediately, and then the enterprise
> has failed before it has begun.
> 

You have touched on a major point.  Defining the problem to be addressed
along with parameters which solutions must follow is important.  The
comment about persons making bad choices raises a whole lot of other
questions.  Some people have advocated that in exchange for universal
income, health care and other services that people who get these
services supply labor for the government.  But this has some obvious
problems to it.  And as already mentioned who decides what is basic and
what is not?

Fred

> I think what you really want to achieve is that people can live a
> dignified basic life pretty much regardless of other choices. That's
> what I think providing the basics of life for free would accomplish,
> and that would be something you couldn't trade away (or at least it
> should be difficult and inconvenient to do so, ideally uneconomical to
> do so).
>