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The idea is to balance spending with subsidies, to prevent inflation. In this new system, there’s nothing preventing people from migrating from antagonistic municipalities to places where subsidies are approved because of good planning and political climate.
You’re still not reading the post closely enough. This isn’t just food stamps and housing vouchers, it’s real dollars created for purpose, with matching subsidies on the supply side. That means if there’s 4T new dollars of housing spending, the system allocates 4T new dollars of housing subsidies to build new homes. There’s two nuances that your gloss misses, first, producers aren’t just compelled to honor welfare tokens. Second, the dollars are created, not gathered through taxes. Both points make the system more palatable to entrenched interests and ordinary people.
I hear you, and it’s really unfortunate that the real life dynamics go that way, since the “bureaucrats” are necessary to defeat subsidy fraud, and the subsidies are what balance the increased demand from living consumption (about 6T by one estimate).
I find this comment flippant and unworthy of a community like LessWrong. First of all, you’re denying the politics of millions of earnest people, many as educated and gifted as you, and second of all, you’re equating a 21st century democratically steered market economy with the totalitarian central planning of 20th century Stalinism. You’re right that no one wants that.
You’re absolutely right, the post is light on details. To answer a few of your points: I don’t have a deep understanding of housing market dynamics beyond the bad deals and pressures I’ve heard about from many different people, especially in the Bay Area. If we were to develop this into a full proposal for public consumption it would include an analysis of how housing subsidy on both the demand and supply side would affect real outcomes. However, that’s somewhat beside the point, as that analysis has nothing to do with the soundness of the system as a whole, and actively denies the good it’s hoping to promulgate.
The debit card system is much less like food stamps than it is like dynamic UBI with constraints. You may have missed the part when a new corps of inspector-accountants validate businesses before they qualify to participate in the program. Once they do, they get a widget that adds a unique nonce to their transaction strings that the system validates. This solves a lot of problems you mention, also, the dynamic and constrained nature of the cards solve many of the issues people have with UBI: that people would spend on trivialities and non-essentials, and that it wouldn’t be enough to make a difference economically. Could someone buy $500 of alcohol with their five $100 retail transactions a week and drink themselves to death? Sure. That’s their prerogative, and their community Target worker (or wherever, just not the liquor store) could ask them if they’re ok the second time if they believe that shouldn’t happen. Further, if that’s not conscionable by a majority of people, the system could include disallowing drugs and alcohol from approved stores.
If we imagine that each individual actor in an environment is constantly transducing incident causal events into further watersheds of causal event chains, and we allow each actor to evaluate the benefit or harm of a given incident causal event, we have a basis for a definition of moral good or evil. Moral good or evil is a positive or negative value of the ratio of benefits of an action less the harms of an action summed over the entire causal watershed and all affected actors, divided by the total benefits and harms determined in the same way. This quantity is computable and ranges from 1 to -1 (pure good, and pure evil).