1. In practice it’s not going to be a UBI with a welfare state, it’s going to be one or the other. There’s literally zero chance of a UBI being implemented but especially not without gutting whatever welfare exists in your country at the same time.

2. With that in mind, what do you do when you rely upon UBI and you suddenly find yourself in a situation with huge medical bills or the need to make your living disability-accessible?

3. Unless it is comprehensively indexed against inflation and the cost of living, it will absolutely get eroded by a death of a thousand cuts via the compounding effect, just like virtually all welfare that exists today under bourgeois democracies. You can almost guarantee that there won’t be comprehensive provisions for this because the government will want an escape clause.

4. What do you do if you are robbed or scammed or you suffer a catastrophic event like a natural disaster or your house burns down and you rely on UBI for your income, and especially for your retirement savings? Without a welfare state, you’re fucked. Part of the rationale for a UBI is that it would mitigate the current welfare trap of the welfare state but this would effectively be replacing a welfare trap with a trapdoor that leads directly to absolute destitution.

5. Does your bourgeois democracy exist in the imperial core? Then it almost certainly relies upon migrant labour to supplement the workforce in a significant way. The US industrial agricultural sector would collapse in a heartbeat without migrant labour. Think of what currently exists for countries like this - there is a significant pool of labourers who either get work visas or they stay in the country illegally. It’s probably already quite hard to become a citizen in these countries. Imagine what that looks like when all of a sudden there’s an immense perverse financial incentive for the government to prevent having to pay for one extra person’s UBI if they could avoid it in any way. Now imagine what it would look like when most people aren’t interested in being spat upon in customer service jobs when they could stay at home and pursue their passions at roughly the same standard of living, if not an improved standard of living. Have you got a picture in mind yet? If not, I’ll give you a clue - this is what the Gulf States look like today. There’s a huge pool of migrant labourers who do all the dirty, shitty jobs that Gulf State citizens simply refuse to do. It’s essentially a caste system reimagined under a liberal democratic framework. And these conditions lead to huge violations of labour rights and even human rights because the existence of these labourers is contingent upon them having work and if they step one millimetre out of line they get fired and sent back home. Forget about trying to navigate the labour laws and judicial system in a foreign country - people struggle to do that where they are citizens and likely speak the language natively and they have extensive support networks in their countries.

6. A UBI would create the ultimate neoliberal deathblow to whatever welfare state exists and it would be perhaps the largest scale privatisation to occur in your country (unless it’s a settler-colonial state, in which case it would be the second largest.)

7. It would take the threat of a violent revolution to bring the bourgeoisie to negotiate a UBI imo. And I’m not being hyperbolic here - you would need a noose around the neck of bourgeois democracy before they’d compromise and… at that point why would you ever settle for half-measures?

8. Milton Friedman, may he rot in piss, was a major proponent of a UBI under the name of a “negative income tax”. If that doesn’t throw up massive red flags for you then there’s something seriously wrong.

Economism, not even once.

Let’s say the government decides to start giving everyone $1000 per month as UBI. Congratulations! Your rent just went up by $1000 per month. Also food is now 5x the price! Why? It’s not because of some nonsense “inflation” or any other nonsense liberal argument against it (or wage increases, for that matter). It’s simply because capitalists are greedy and they want every cent of your money they can get. If you have more money in your pocket each month, they’ll take all of it and more.

UBI cannot work unless you also implement price controls on basically everything, which governments simply won’t do. Inflation isn’t real. Capitalist greed is. Capital controls the governments, and they’re never going to do anything that benefits you.

UBI is “ill give you 5$ to fuck off” policy. It further separates people from the means of production. UBI either privileges the consumer as the core of the person, is based on some utopian technological future that leaves many people irrelevant to the social reproduction of society (where ubi then becomes a gift from the elect/entrepeneurs/etc to the surplus population) or a stop gap solution to the globalization of businesses where workers can no longer lay a claim on equity in the business they work for and all redistribution has to be via the state.

I just ate an entire box of peanut butter girl scout cookies and now I feel like shit

Will UBI fix that? No? Then why should I care?

There are two different approaches to UBI.

One is conceptualized as a transition period to a fully postscarcity, post-money economy, giving workers the ultimate strike fund. This would be good, but can’t happen under capitalism, under bourgeois democracy because it would remove the reserve army of labor. Capitalists need a poor and desperate underclass living in desperation that they can use as a threat against their workers.

The other concept of UBI is as a lifeline for capitalism and as a way to marketize, privatize, and replace all other social services. This type of UBI is the only one possible under bourgeois democracy and could never be enough to live on. It would function only as a subsidy to landlords and to the businesses underpaying workers.