The people who have more than most by orders of magnitude will never tire in their attempts to convince everyone that (1) without their participation (rule) everything will break down; (2) without their philanthropy (self-serving monetary arrangements using tax-exempted entities they fully control) everything will break down; (3) giving people a modicum of pecuniary independence will cause an immediate collapse and everything will break down. Meanwhile they advocate for a draconian surveillance-based system because, as you can see, everything is breaking down. QED.
This is why I question the article’s premise. There is no risk of liberal democracies implementing a UBI that supports anything beyond subsistence. Most people in developed countries will want more than that.
The biggest issue I see with UBI is that the rates could be set below the cost of living and used as justification to eliminate all other support programs, as was feared the Nixon administration would do when it proposed a negative income tax in the late 1960s. Different solutions are still needed for the small subset of the population that cannot limit spending to necessities when required.
Coincidentally in Eastern Germany they (or so I heard) had a "keys to the toilet" trope, meaning that whoever managed to obtain any kind of position (being entrusted with controlling access to a vital facility) could and often would then go and take advantage of it by expecting bribes-in-kind from people.
> You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle
Which is the way that things are tending to evolve into in much of Europe because after decades of touting and mandating "private-public partnerships" and mandatory "open-market" policies, now communes and cities find it difficult or impossible to maintain their municipality-based and owned utilities, including gas, water, electricity and public transportation, because they get basically forced to sell to the lowest bidder. In electricity, that's frequently simply the biggest and baddest competitor like Vattenfall or RWE, replacing century-old locally-owned operators that have had very good track records across two world wars and generations of consumers, operators that never had ANY need of being replaced, except for neo-liberal demagogues and improved opportunities of syphoning off profits from the public into already rich private pockets. It's just stealing made legal.
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