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Some observers argue that basic income has been tried in the past and failed. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/the-failure-of-a-past-basic-income-guaran

• resu_nimda 9y ago
  Interesting article. One key difference is that this was done before/during the Industrial Revolution, so it was probably too early. The amount of human labor it takes to provide basic needs for one human is an important factor. For example: It was intended as an emergency measure to help the poor when grain prices had risen sharply due to meager harvests. Today we can produce so much food we have to come up with creative ways to keep it valuable - subsidies, dumping it, etc. We've "lost" a ton of agriculture jobs since that experiment was tried, because we can do it with less people. Seems reasonable to transfer those gains back to the people instead of all of them going to the guy that owns the harvester.