Poverty is not considered to be a unsolved problem in academic economics. An NIT has wide support as a way to both directly eliminate poverty while taking away the need for distortionary measures such as minimum wage and the administrative costs they entail.
Slippery slopes to totalitarianism aside, you're afraid of terrible social decay? The social decay I'm worried about is people falling into crime or prostitution out of desperation, or people's lives becoming unbearable to the point where drugs seem like a necessity. Enabling laziness to any degree is less deleterious to society than requiring single parents to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support their families.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is merely a natural consequence of diminishing marginal utility and subsequently underpins a lot of welfare economics. It doesn't necessitate any trappings of communism and to make that causal leap is beyond disingenuous.
Proponents of basic income use the same rhetoric. This is what I find dangerous. Overly ambitious politicians tripping the masses to rise against the evil rich bastards. Like for example in the heart of Europe - France. Or Hungary. Or plenty of other populist political parties in Europe. Most all of which linked with sponsorship from the Russian government.
And what's your point? That the efficacy or applicability of these ideas is somehow diminished by their presence in the political rhetoric of European minor parties?
That we are going to make awful, rash decisions because of a bunch of self-entitled pricks, lead by a bunch of gullible and vain mr.know-it-alls. For the benefit, and sponsored by a few unscrupulous KGB officers.
The Chicago school is a driving force behind the NIT, and I'm pretty sure Friedman wasn't secretly shilling for the Mossad or whatever the intelligence agency du jour may be. Dismissing ideas based on disagreement with some of their lesser proponents is not logically sound.
I'm not dismissing the idea because of the unsound reasoning in lesser proponents. I'm opposed to the idea because it ignores how humans work - like any animal - on an incentive program. Your body needs water? Drink that glass, get hormones released for the good job! Much more so when we talk about high level activities. If you remove the incentive system from the social framework we live in, people will simply stop caring. Like a pothead stops caring about anything. His brain is showered in endorphenes on demand. Because of that, he has no motivation for anything else.
I mention the lesser proponents of the basic income idea, as you describe them, because I'm scared senseless from what a bunch of self-entitled, special little snowflakes can do.
There are other ways to achieve the results basic income is trying to achieve. Subsidize their electricity,water,phone. Give free textbooks, subsidize education for their children. Teach them how to manage money. Reduce the government overhead with technology, get more efficient, invest the excess money in the programs. Those are not problems only for starving people. You can do it for people with under certain threshold of median income. People will be free to spend their money on things other than the bare necessities, thus increasing their quality of life.
Slippery slopes to totalitarianism aside, you're afraid of terrible social decay? The social decay I'm worried about is people falling into crime or prostitution out of desperation, or people's lives becoming unbearable to the point where drugs seem like a necessity. Enabling laziness to any degree is less deleterious to society than requiring single parents to work multiple minimum wage jobs to support their families.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is merely a natural consequence of diminishing marginal utility and subsequently underpins a lot of welfare economics. It doesn't necessitate any trappings of communism and to make that causal leap is beyond disingenuous.