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Multiheaded comments on Politics Discussion Thread September 2012 - Less Wrong
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A basic income guarantee is also endorsed by Charles Murray in his book In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State.
The basic income guarantee has the neat feature that it eliminates some of the perverse incentives of welfare as well as possibly being psychologically much more beneficial since people will know they have a secure revenue stream no matter what, while government programs often require compliance to all sorts of requirements.
http://old.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/qa200603270732.asp
Interview of Murray about the book.
As per usual, he seems like a reasonable fellow.
In some situations those requirements may be nonsensical or even actively harmful. One usual harmful pattern is using the heuristics "we help more to those who need to be helped most" to detect people trying to improve their situation and then excessively reduce the help given to them. Soon it become common knowledge that if you try to help yourself, you may end worse.
Situation A: The government takes $1000 from me and gives it to you.
Situation B: The government takes $1000 from me and gives it to you ... then takes another $1000 from me to pay someone to go around and pry into your personal life.
Any consequentialist libertarian should agree that Situation A involves less loss of liberty for both of us than Situation B does.
Shouldn't most consequentialist liberals too? This plan is lifestyle blind. If I want to be a bohemian artist, work pro bono full time, edit wikipedia, smoke marijuana or just play Xbox in my basement, I won't be judged by the electorate or state for it.