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> 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. |