[guizzy]

Because centrally planned economies have been notoriously unable to predict and meet demand. Adequately meeting demand is important, especially considering how fresh and healthy food is for the most part perishable. Perhaps one day, when/if something like Soylent can be supplied as a utility this would work.

[grinnbearit]

This isn't a centrally planned economy, its a centrally planned expense. Once you know how many people you need to provide for, how much it costs is simple multiplication. Mass manufacturing and predictable consumption will help reduce costs even further.

Basic Income is harder, how much do I pay to prevent people suffering? Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$? What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?

[dragonwriter]

> Will people still die if I provide 10k$ how about 20k$?

People will still die whatever you do (and whether you do it by BI or whether you do it by central purchasing of common goodie baskets) -- probably more in the latter case than the former, for a given expenditure level, because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ.

> What if they're really bad at decision making and gamble it away or get robbed?

People can -- and do -- gamble goods when they don't have cash, and get robbed of goods as well; those aren't problems unique to cash, nor are they problems that central purchasing of common baskets of goods makes any easier to address than distributing cash does.

[grinnbearit]

"because the overhead costs are higher and people's needs differ."

I don't understand how the overhead costs are higher with more predictable results and mass production (or are we defining costs differently?). Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets?

I'm proposing unlimited baskets of goods purely for predictable cost reasons, it doesn't really matter if they gamble them away, although I find it unlikely they'd find any takers since everyone has access to the same baskets.

Welfare is a cost, basic income doesn't seem like it would satisfy that cost in the most efficient way.

[dragonwriter]

> I don't understand how the overhead costs are higher

There's an agency problem when one actor is making purchasing decisions on behalf of others without any necessary alignment of interests, which, absent other controls (which themselves have a not-insignificant cost, both in terms of administration and in terms of potentially distorting results in other ways), those decisions end up reflecting interests of the decision-maker rather than the nominal beneficiaries -- this is the problem that gives us, on the one hand, outright corruption in government purchasing when there aren't adequate controls, and, where controls are adopted to fight that, frequenly byzantine bureaucratic rules nominally designed to prevent corruption that have the side effects of making both sides of government contracting more costly in administrative terms and effectively restricting government contracting to those entities that specialized in navigating those rules -- restricting competition and decreasing efficiency.

With the central welfare authority deciding what people need, where to source it from, and in what quantities, there are lots of points where either corruption opportunities or expensive corruption controls are necessary; when the only administrative determination that needs to be made is whether straightforward class membership like "citizenship", etc., are met, the number of points at which you either pay the cost of corruption or corruption controls is reduced.

> Isn't the goal to provide basic living for people who can't provide for themselves instead of letting them die on the streets?

IMO, the goal of BI is, on the theoretical side, to address systematic distributional inequities in capitalist markets, and, on the pragmatic side, to provide a glide-path out of an economy oriented around wage labor as the primary source of individual support as automation and other changes render that increasing less viable as a basis for the economy with broad prosperity.

Enabling people to avoid starving in the streets is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for that.