I despise bureaucracy as much as the next person, but replacing welfare programs with negative income tax will not work. There are just too many people and too

I despise bureaucracy as much as the next person, but replacing welfare programs with negative income tax will not work. There are just too many people and too little money. Welfare programs are specific and target select audience; targeting broad audience will just spread the money to wafer-thin levels. Concerning the automation and sudden increases in productivity — but this was exactly the very same promise that full-scale Communism was expected to deliver in Soviet Union. It was reiterated in internal propaganda endlessly (I still remember that). As every ex-Soviet person knows well, the full-scale Communism (with free basic income, fully automated factories and cities of the future) was promised as early as 1980. Now it is called "post-scarcity". It wasn't delivered then, and I doubt it will be delivered this century.