Being a take-my-money-and-leave-me-alone libertarian who values time and mental effort much more than money, I would love to replace the existing hodgepodge of a welfare system in the US with UBI + single payer health insurance.
I'm the same as you, except that I'm still not convinced yet. The more that I see this idea being pushed, the more I'm convinced that people are going to want to add this to the list of the many government handouts, not replace them.
That's not what would happen. Such a simple, elegant system would never make it through congress. It's frankly naive to believe that UBI would be implemented the way libertarians envision it.
There are many reasons to believe that we would end up with UBI in addition to most of the programs we currently have. They are the same reasons we have the programs we have now, and those reasons will continue to operate in politics and society.
I would be all for UBI if I thought it was possible to implement it in a simple and effective way, but that can't happen in a democracy, especially not ours.
Lawrence Lessing had the right message this campaign cycle, at least.
> but that can't happen in a democracy
Is implying every variation of democracy has been tried, and all have proven unable to establish... UBI? That is a low bar to set for policy implementation potential.
But this applies to any government program proposition. Before you can actually propose to enact anything, you need to actually be represented and have power in your own government. That is the first and foremost problem in the US, as this Princeton study shows[1] (tldr, policy propositions in congress have no correlation with the will of the people, and steep correlation with campaign financiers will).
But this is not a UBI-unique problem. Want more / less free speech / guns / healthcare / infrastructure / military / welfare / social security / taxes / anything from the government? You might want to actually have influence with it first, which you do not have if you are not rich right now.
