A different argument against Universal Basic Income

It's my understanding that in a democracy, the criteria for how various groups of people are treated isn't so much "are these people economically useful for the state", but rather "how much voting power do these people have and use" (the democracy parts of The Rulers for Rulers are relevant here). For instance, as the linked video notes, countries where the vote of the farming block swings elections tend to have large farming subsidies, even though this pretty much means that the farmers need the state financially and not the other way around.

It seems plausible to me that UBI could even make its recipients more politically influential: I used to have some involvement with Finnish politics, and heard that the various political parties rely a lot on pensioners as their volunteers, since pensioners have a lot of spare time that they can use on politics. This would suggest that interventions such as the UBI that may give its beneficiaries more free time, increase the chances of those beneficiaries participating in the political system and thus being taken more into account in decision-making.

The title primed me to upvote the OP, because I think novel, potentially overlooked arguments against promising policies are valuable. However, reading the post from start to finish, I don't think the core critique is communicated clearly. It seems to go from

1. the UBI making the "assumption that the state needs its citizens" "more wrong", to

2. the UBI intensifying the divide between "contributors and noncontributors", to

3. the UBI worsening, "in the long run", the difficulties of integrating "the economically unnecessary parts of the population into society", to, in the end

4. the UBI triggering "unforeseen consequences", "a whole class of problems that arise out of the changed relationships between citizens, states and economies"

and these four critiques are not the same, and not interchangeable. Moreover, the point where the post ends up (critique 4) is not novel or different to those I've seen before. It's the generic warning of unintended consequences that gets levelled against every public policy proposal ever, basic income included.

While I'm here, I'm uneasy with the handling of the side points as well. Paragraph 2 conflates Saudi Arabia's population with its citizenry, and these aren't the same thing. Yes, that sounds like pedantry, and for a lot of countries it would be pedantry, but Saudi Arabia might be literally the worst big country for which to elide the population-citizenry distinction. And the treatment of existing UBI critiques in the last paragraph is unduly generous. The claim that a UBI would "be impossible to get rid of if it is a failure" is very strong, and the notion that a UBI is mutually exclusive of "gradual approaches" puzzles me, since a UBI could certainly be introduced gradually (whether by gradually increasing the UBI allowance from zero, or by introducing the "U" in "UBI" slowly by incrementally expanding the range of people included).

I haven't downvoted the post either, because I do like the idea of using Discussion as a forum for polishing half-baked arguments about topics popular on LW, and don't (at the moment) want to discourage that activity.

Universal Basic Income and the Threat of Tyranny

http://quillette.com/2017/10/09/universal-basic-income-threat-tyranny/

"The World Bank gives us a list of countries ordered by what percentage of their merchandise exports comes from fuels. At 50% or more we find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can we notice a trend? How many of these countries provide a good set of political rights for their citizens?"

" A country that generates its wealth from its citizens has no choice but to keep those citizens happy, at least to some degree; a country that generates its wealth from oil wells, only needs to keep a handful of mercenaries happy as they guard the access to those wells."

Society where a majority requires UBI to live is going to be a perfect situation for any state - this means that the majority knows that without the state, it gets nothing. Soon, they are going to start hating the productive minority. Tax the productive guy maximum he can bear, give part of that to the masses, keep part for yourself. No democratic change possible because the majority needs UBI and would kill to keep it. No popular revolution either.

It's not that unlike the current welfare state model, just taken to its logical conclusion. One of the problems of the welfare state - from the government's perspective - is that many people see eg. public pensions and money from make-work as something they earned, rather than something that they get from the state, which makes it much harder to vilify the actual producers.