The idea of a UBI that provides a comfortable lifestyle for anyone who doesn’t want to work a normal job is just a pipe dream.
The statement wasn't "UBI frees people from the need to work"; it was something more like "UBI might embolden people to pursue passion projects since they'd have reduced fear of financial ruin."
The latter seems plausible to me. I have personally decided not to pursue a startup idea because I didn't want to take a ride on the venture capital pain train, and I also didn't want to drop my income all the way to zero and start burning through my savings in order to do it. UBI might have changed that calculus.
Even today, people do live like this, cheaply on a "basic" income to grind out a dream. Only instead of relying on ubi, they work part time at a restaurant while waiting for more work in their field to line up in the meanwhile perhaps, and take on roommates to cut rent in half or more. Would UBI mean those people no longer have to wait tables? Sure, but its not like the struggling actor suddenly gets more phone calls when they call off work for their other job, since they are taking the restaurant job in the first place because they have so much free time between jobs they might as well monetize it. Plus, someone has to wait the tables at the end of the day.
Now I do believe in universal healthcare.
It doesn't matter how confident I am in my vision. If the potential failure scenario is life-long debt and debilitating financial pain for my family and my children for their entire upbringing, anything less than 100% certainty might as well be 0%.
For many people, the decision is "I think this is a good idea, and could do very well, and could bring a lot of good to a very large amount of people, but good things fail all the time. If for some reason, the market decides not to take interest, or some competitor that has yearly turnover in the tens of billions of dollars decides to crush me, then I will be carrying the consequences of other peoples' decisions for the rest of my life, and my savings will be gone, and I won't be able to cope with even a minor medical situation, which is why I make sure to keep 5 figures in my savings account, because even with my medical insurance that I pay $1k monthly for, I can still lose up to $8k per year out of pocket, and medical insurance frequently decides to not even cover my needs anyway. I can't afford the time and effort to even sue them for what I need."
The US is not a good place for innovation unless you're already rich or the innovation is guaranteed not to fail.
- Because investors typically only care only about return on investment - not everything that's beneficial to society has a monetary return, or an immediately apparent monetary return (e.g. NASA investments have given some of the best returns ever, over time, but they didn't have the goal or apparent method of making returns at the start).
- Intelligent people are typically less confident than idiots, because they are more likely to be aware of additional potential risks/failure points. Confidence in an idea/vision is not necessarily a good indicator of anything and you're more likely to support an idiot's idea if confidence is your deciding factor.
- In the case of a UBI, it's not like the money is going to disappear. It will go immediately into securing basic needs, which will cycle the money back through the economy immediately and more likely at a local level.
I have underlying medical conditions, so like the parent poster I have decided against any startups because I need to tie myself to a corporate overlord so that they can pay my insurance premiums. Last time I checked Healthcare.gov I would have $26,000+ in medical bills each year. That’s a paywall for my health and well-being that would make an early startup so much harder. Taking a shock like the startup folding becomes truly traumatic. So I don’t. I sit in my cubicle so that I can stay healthy.
The parent poster was talking about this. In the US, failing a venture isn’t just “running out of money”. It can be really dangerous and difficult to navigate. Not that anyone should hand them money to fund a startup.
