[CuriousSkeptic]

> income redistribution schemes such as UBI

It’s a common framing, but UBI does not have to be that. Another may be that of a just compensation for giving up access to land.

> Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice

[motorest]

> It’s a common framing, but UBI does not have to be that.

Do you understand your comment is a textbook example of moving the goalpost?

I am not "framing" anything. I am describing to you exactly how a universal basic income scheme works. Even the argument presented by UBI proponents to counter the problems with equity and perverse incentives is that the net benefit comes from eliminating all other types of incentives and the overhead they require to validate and prevent fraud.

> Another may be that of a just compensation for giving up access to land.

I don't think you read the source you're citing. It proposed inheritance tax that funded only a very basic social safety net program that at best covered retirement pensions only to those who outlived life expectancy and only around 1/3 of the income of an average agricultural labourer. That is very far from what any UBI proposal required in terms of the sheer volume of income that has to be redistributed.

So even in your example you are faced with the challenges of math and budgeting. Where does the money come from? Apparently income redistribution and the fundamental problems of equity and fairness is not it, and the alternative you proposed would come very short of even covering a pensioner's basic needs. So where do you think the money comes from?

[CuriousSkeptic]

If you by moving the goalpost mean I'm not that interested in the actual size of an UBI, then yes that is probably fair. The point of my argument is exactly that an UBI does not need to be conceptualized from the perspective of needs but rather from the perspective of rights. As such I do agree that the math may not balance out to an amount that is actually livable. Which I think is a fine outcome.

The point of my source was not so much the economic argument, which, after all, talks about a reality several hundred years ago. Perhaps I should have linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism instead, to focus on the moral side of it.

I do think however that a modern take, especially if it turns out that recent AI developments will have sizable impact on the demand for human labor, could very well turn out to result in a dividend that is actually livable. Paine talks about land, but we should really consider all commons: Land, carbon emission rights, patents, copyright, trademark protections, electromagnetic spectrum, ip4 address space, dns names, the list can be made pretty extensive.

Perhaps it should end there. We could establish the idea of cooperatively owned legal entities representing various commons. These entities can collect rent in exchange for allocating parts of the commons to private use. I have a feeling it would make sense to take it a step further though, even if the details are probably over my head at the moment. It's already the case that pension funds function as a cooperative ownership of a part of all capital assets. And then there is home ownership and its connection to loans and wages. There probably will need to be some creative restructuring of this situation.