Okay, cards on the table here. I am a left libertarian, which for the purposes of the US means that I mostly vote Democrat, though I always listen to what the candidates have to say and give them a chance to make their case. The point is, I’m not coming on here to pretend that I’m conservative and try to build a bandwagon; I believe that it’s hard to make the world a better place while being dishonest. That said, I’ve worked alongside flag-waving fox-watching conservatives most of my life, and I think I’ve got a fairly good handle on that point of view.

So, here’s the point: I think there’s a conservative case for certain things that a lot of things that conservatives have just sort of taken at face value as bad.

UBI: Okay, so the state, non-profits, and charities spend an enormous amount of money on homelessness, poverty, and so on. Isn’t it a conservative tenant that nobody knows better how to use your money than you? Why shouldn’t that apply to the poor and homeless? Research has consistently shown good outcomes from UBI wherever it’s been tried, and in some studies at actually decreased unemployment. My intuition is that if you just give the money to folks instead of winnowing it away through layers and layers of bureaucrats, means testing, and so on, they’ll make the right decisions for themselves most of the time. “But wait”, you might be thinking to yourself, “what about the people who won’t make the right decisions for themselves?” Let me ask you this, has forty or fifty years of paying for ever more bureaucracy and means testing to catch and micromanage these people managed to fix it? There’s no reason to think that will change. If someone’s going to be that way, there’s nothing on this earth that’s going to change that but themselves.

15-Minute Cities and Urbanism: I’m a part of this movement. Nobody wants to make you live in a city if you don’t want to. Nobody wants to make you live in a high rise apartment. The point is to get bad regulations out of the way and facilitate cities that are more efficient, more affordable, and more closely resemble the cities that arise under normal free market conditions like you see in Europe and Japan (cities basically everywhere else in the world tend to go up rather than out). Did you know that for every dollar a car driver spends on driving, the government spends $10 supporting that same driver? That is, we lose 10 dollars for every dollar spent on driving. Public transport actually generates one cent per dollar spent on it, and bicycling and pedestrian traffic generates three cents per dollar spent on it. Not just that, but car centric infrastructure isn’t free market, it’s the government locking you in to needing a (very expensive) product to participate in society. The choice in terms of fiscal responsibility is clear. Don’t like cities? That’s okay, you don’t have to, but it’s important to remember that cities are, like it or not, our economic engines. Having healthier, better cities is better for everyone, including rural markets that sell to and buy from their regional metropolitan. Besides that, we aim to stop the phenomenon of [your local metro] growing out to be knocking on [your small town’s] door. There’s a lot more for conservatives to appreciate here, it’s a lot more than just climate concerns.

Public transport: It’s hard for people to live within their means when when the way we’ve designed our world makes it hard for people to live within their means. Cars aren’t cheap, and practically forcing people into car ownership is against a number of things conservatives stand for, including freedom of markets, strong communities (car centric infrastructure tends to erode community identities and bonds because people don’t do business or anything else in their community besides sleep and occasionally wave at the neighbor), and affordable living. Cars also provide a convenient avenue for government overreach because of how dangerous they are to operate. There’s so many laws on the books around cars that it’s relatively easy for an officer to pull someone over first and think of a reason later, to say nothing of all the layers of bureaucracy that go into regulating cars and drivers. It gives the government a lot of opportunities to intrude on your business. It’s a little ironic that public transit actually offers more anonymity and fewer reasons for the government to interfere with you. It’s also often the case that public transit is not only more affordable than owning and driving car, but also much cheaper to scale than continuously adding more and more lanes to a road. Also, having good public transit means that the elderly will have an easier and safer time getting around their communities once they’re not fit to drive anymore, we can raise the bar on driver’s licenses to keep bad drivers off the road, and we won’t have to spend so much time and money hunting down and preventing drunk drivers because they’ll just take the train or walk (in the case of 15 minute cities) instead. What about fiscal responsibility? Public transit is cheaper in the long run than both road maintenance and road expansion.

There’s some other policies that I think a case could be made for, but I think it’s a little more of a reach on those fronts. Also, what I’ve laid out here is not exhaustive, I think there’s a lot of things to like about these policies from almost any direction.

The case for UBI is based on false premises.

First, it’s not cost-effective. Kind of giving everyone a living wage is going to cost more money than any government spends on anything right now. Simple arithmetic will prove this.

Second, it will destroy jobs. By design, some proportion of people with UBI will choose not to work. We don’t just work to get a paycheck. We work to be productive, that’s where the money to pay workers comes from. Without workers there won’t be productivity, with less productivity the economy shrinks, and the shrinking economy has less jobs.

Money at that point doesn’t matter because money is meaningless. If you’re trapped on a desert island with a million dollars, all you’ve really got is a pile of cotton or plastic (depending where your money came from). Money represents a stake in productive output of an economy, so you can give more money, but there isn’t as much productive output. More on this later.

So you’ve got the most expensive program ever, and it harms economic output, it will not save government spending. The argument is that because you won’t need to spend as much money administering the program it will save money, but when the cash outlay is so much higher, there’s no reasonable level of savings that could save enough money to justify it. You could save 100% of welfare savings and you’d still be doubling government budgets to implement UBI.

You can say “we’ll get rid of all other government programs!”, and I call bullshit. If you say to people “You’re going to get UBI, but if you get sick you pay out of pocket now!”, Many people will want to opt out of that, and as for other social programs, some people don’t need money, they need help. Someone with down syndrome or someone born into an abusive family that is developmentally stunted isn’t going to be ok without help, regardless of the amount of money you hand them, because they aren’t competent to live on their own.

Finally, it’s just the raw economics of the thing. We got a taste of a form of UBI during covid. I will grant you that it isn’t exactly the same since there was a global pandemic that also contributed greatly to things, but as a natural experiment it largely proves many of the predicted problems. A lot of able-bodied people took the money and refused to work, driving down supply while demand stayed the same, causing shortages followed by rising prices. Stocks also rose despite the economic catastrophe as people took their “free money” and used it to gamble in markets.

Morally, it looks a lot like slavery; stealing from the working through taxes and inflation to hand to people who often could work but don’t want to. People who would continue to work would often be people with families to support who can’t just hole up in a dorm with 5 other single guys and play COD all day.

This argument is not a lie, and it’s not purely emotional. It’s based on my perspective and concerns regarding Universal Basic Income (UBI). I’ve presented logical reasoning and observations to support my viewpoint, addressing potential economic and social consequences of implementing UBI. While you may hold different opinions on this topic, this argument is a valid expression of my perspective and concerns. It’s essential to have constructive discussions and debates about complex issues like UBI to explore various viewpoints and find common ground where possible.

Housing is scarce, many states are implementing rules to make constructing new homes more expensive. Maine for instance has a bunch of efficiency standards that increase new home costs by ~30%.