How are you more at the mercy of the rich if you have more money?
Consider a very smart and very poor person. You walk up to him and say "Hey, want 1200 dollars?" Do you think he'll say "No, that would increase my dependence on the rich." I don't.
I just can't conceive of the mechanism. Slum lords try to separate the poor from their money now. Pretty much everyone does. The only difference is, the poor would have more money.
There's probably going to be predation on the mentally ill or incompetent. That could be solved by helping those people, limiting what they can buy, or harshly punishing the exploiters - some combination. But even if they were cheated out of their UBI I don't see how they'd be worse off (without assuming people wouldn't help the mentally incompetent if they had UBI which seems dubious to me).
Consider a very smart and very poor person. You walk up to him and say "Hey, want 1200 dollars?" Do you think he'll say "No, that would increase my dependence on the rich." I don't.
I just can't conceive of the mechanism. Slum lords try to separate the poor from their money now. Pretty much everyone does. The only difference is, the poor would have more money.
There's probably going to be predation on the mentally ill or incompetent. That could be solved by helping those people, limiting what they can buy, or harshly punishing the exploiters - some combination. But even if they were cheated out of their UBI I don't see how they'd be worse off (without assuming people wouldn't help the mentally incompetent if they had UBI which seems dubious to me).