I think all discussion of initiatives like UBI or of other safety net or welfare schemes founder on the same fundamental problem: What is the victory condition?
How do you define one society as better (or worse) than another? Whether that's an assessment of the past vs the present vs a hoped-for (or to be guarded against) future; Or a comparison between contemporary societies in different places, we all seem to be able to point to extreme examples of societies we don't want to emulate, but it seems that nobody agrees on what we actually want to achieve.
Personally, I would happily sacrifice the ease of obtaining extraordinary wealth, if it allowed us to dramatically reduce poverty, homelessness, and lack of access to food, shelter, healthcare, education, and infrastructure.
But it seems that many people (*cough*Loren Pechtel*cough*) see the absence of freeloaders as more important than the universal availability of those things.
I suspect that there's a fundamental disagreement on what money does. We agree that it's a way to 'keep score' - that (in principle) the more you provide, the more money you should end up with. Indeed, wealth can reasonably be thought of as the debt society owes its holder.
The disagreement comes in the details. It's obvious to me (but apparently not to others) that there's an 'aggregating problem'. A person who invents a 'must have' widget, that almost everyone wants to own, and is prepared to pay $10 for, has perhaps provided $10 of value to each of a hundred million customers; But that doesn't imply that the inventor is owed $1billion by society. We currently use that very simple arithmetic equality, but even then we recognise that a portion of the $1bn 'earned' in this way should simply cease to exist (ie be taxed, which is one of the simplest ways for a currency issuing government to destroy money). Nevertheless, some people become insanely wealthy. Nobody's owed a third private jet because of the tiny value placed on their work by a huge number of people. Certainly not while there are people without sufficient food.
Equally, we accept that money should be created (via government spending), in pursuit of the building of infrastructure, and the provision of certain basics to people who are in need, but unable to provide for themselves. But there are HUGE disagreements as to the degree to which these things should occur, and the degree to which they should be interlinked.
To resolve these disagreements, we first need to decide what we want to achieve. What does a better society look like? What are the distinguishing features that separate a better society from a worse one? What features need to be compromised or traded off, and where are the optimal trade-offs to be found? (A classic example is a trade-off between freedom and security, which apparently are antithetical to each other).
What, in short, are we trying to achieve?
