Let's unplug them and test it before rolling it out on a large scale. We don't want to order a billion free energy machines before we know that they actually work without being plugged in.

Will tax payers in the UBI community accept their increased taxes? Will those paying taxes move out of the community, leaving only those on UBI behind (who will then not be able to fund the UBI)? Will we see an influx of unproductive citizens into the community to gain the UBI benefits?

Once that's answered, we'll have a better idea of the feasibility and requirements. If people want to avoid the increased taxes so much that they'll move, we'll know that we need to close the borders to force them to stay, for example.

> Will tax payers in the UBI community accept their increased taxes? Will those paying taxes move out of the community, leaving only those on UBI behind (who will then not be able to fund the UBI)? Will we see an influx of unproductive citizens into the community to gain the UBI benefits?

But then you have exactly the same problem -- a small scale experiment doesn't tell you that.

If you did a UBI experiment that applied to a single street in a single neighborhood then of course people would do that, because moving across the street would net you $10,000/year while still effectively living in the same community.

But are they going to move to another state, leave their job, community, business contacts, family, friends and everything they've ever known? Much less likely.

You also need a certain amount of scale to encompass a realistic level of diversity. If I want to disprove your point I could do a UBI experiment in East LA where there are no rich people to move out, or in Newport Beach where the cost of living is too high for someone to be able to afford to move in just to receive the UBI.

The real question is whether it would work at the state level, which you can only tell by actually implementing it at the state level.

And your concerns wouldn't even apply to doing it at the national level because we do have national borders and citizenship.

> If you did a UBI experiment that applied to a single street in a single neighborhood then of course people would do that, because moving across the street would net you $10,000/year while still effectively living in the same community.

So it has to be world-wide immediately? Of course, if you only do it in e.g. Denmark, the Danish might escape to Northern Germany or Southern Norway or Sweden, while still living broadly in the same region.

Anything that's "we can't really show how great it will be until all of humanity has been convinced to go all-in, but trust us, it'll be great" has a super high risk: it might not be great at all, but since we've all committed to it, the damage isn't even contained.

> But are they going to move to another state, leave their job, community, business contacts, family, friends and everything they've ever known? Much less likely.

For a 30-50% increase in taxes? I'm not so sure. Given that their peers are usually similar to them and will also look to emigrate, you might see whole communities leave... at which point you'll need the tried & tested barrier of building literal walls with armed guards on top to keep people from escaping the utopia you've created.

It's not like we haven't tried that before, and it's not like it ended with people being shot for trying to leave. And, once the regimes fell, we've generally considered their actions crimes against humanity. Do we really need to repeat that once every other generation?

> So it has to be world-wide immediately?

It has to be at the scale you want to know if it works in order to see if it works at that scale. If you want to know if it works at the state level, you try it at the state level.

> For a 30-50% increase in taxes? I'm not so sure.

You're forgetting about the counterbalance. If you make somewhat more than average then you pay $16,000 in taxes and receive a $12,000 UBI. On net you're paying $4000, not $16,000. And you don't have to pay taxes to fund welfare anymore, so you were already paying most or all of the $4000 to begin with, and still would be in the place without the UBI.

> It's not like we haven't tried that before

There was a country that tried a national UBI before? Which one?

>Let's unplug them and test it before rolling it out on a large scale.

Not a bad idea, but wouldn't that essentially degenerate into a capital allocation business with a functioning taxation/wealth redistribution system?

Let's be honest here. There's nothing "magic" about UBI. UBI is just what happens when you successfully tax the top of the wealth accumulation frustrum such that overall the distribution of wealth is less a pyramid and more a recognizable trapezoid. Less triangular, more quad.

The main problem is tax havening, Hollywood accounting, and abusable tax loopholes. Fix the international taxation scene/arrangement, cut down on the viability of tax evasion via legal fiction engineering, fund the capability to track down and successfully audit examples of gratuitous tax evasion (or implement bug bounties for those who help flesh out corner cases in tax law) and actually implement decent social safety nets and we could be on to something.

I get it isn't easy, that there is a lot of difficulty in getting things just right, but I dare say that in terms of seeing actual credible attempts at implementing what needs to be implemented to make it work I've seen astonishingly little; especially given that these measures would be largely deleterious to the beneficiaries of the current status quo, and would greatly shift the calculus around capital allocation away from billion/trillionaires funding personal space programs to actually enabling national scale endeavor coordination; which also brings with it the absolutely critical aspect of getting the political operating smoothly again to unlock that newly collected capital potential by keeping it flowing back into the input layers of the economy.

I can't be the only one seeing the economy as a massive NN, in which individual people are the input nodes, legal fictions are hidden layers, and government/taxation are the feedback/error propagation mechanism am I?

> The main problem is tax havening, Hollywood accounting, and abusable tax loopholes.

But this is one of the other things that a UBI makes easy.

One of the best taxes in terms of resisting avoidance is a flat rate consumption tax. You can move your headquarters but you can't move your customers. You can't arbitrage the rate because it's uniform. The burden falls disproportionately on uncompetitive industries which have to eat the tax when a cost increase across the industry doesn't allow them to raise prices any further because they were already charging monopoly prices.

The normal problem with a consumption tax is that it's regressive. Everybody pays the same rate. But that's the part that gets fixed by combining it with a UBI. Someone making $50,000 may be paying a 35% marginal rate, and $17,500 in tax, but they get $12,000 of it back. Their effective rate is only 11%, even though everybody is paying the same marginal rate.

You get to have an increasing effective rate with increasing income while still having the fixed marginal rate that makes everything administratively simple, and the complexity was what enabled the avoidance.

I agree, it's essentially a large redistribution scheme that requires those that are supposed to be giving not having a chance to just leave.

Tax havens and loopholes are a problem even today, but hard to fix. Germany or France would (ostensibly) love to fix them, but can't make Luxembourg or Switzerland stop offering deals and havens. Introducing UBI (and higher taxes that provide even more incentives to leave) in France or Germany won't change anything on that front.

Anything that requires global cooperation seems outside of current possibilities. Building something on the basis of "that'll work, no worries" sounds like leaving out authentication of a bank system and saying "no worries, we'll convince everyone not to cheat and log into their neighbors' account". Sure, in theory that's a great concept, but practically I'd personally avoid using that bank.