I'm fairly confident that we'll never agree on anything
I stand corrected, we do sort of agree on several points!
You've got to agree that the fact that "every government" having embarked on a course provides ZERO PROOF that it is the correct action.
Yes, agreed on principle on the lack of proof. What is happening is that governments are giving huge handouts to prop up businesses and individuals to cover their losses during the lockdown, with the assumption that if they did not do so, then businesses would either collapse or else be forced to lay off huge numbers of employees. Governments are trying to keep the current system going. I agree that there is no proof that this is the best approach, given that (AFAIK) no other approaches have been attempted - but if the aim is to minimise economic damage, then can you suggest any better approaches? Does the current approach work to prevent catastrophic economic damage? Would 'do nothing' result in less damage?
in the USA we have states, and we can experiment with things like UBI to a fair extent. I'm not at all opposed to that. What I'm opposed to is attempts to put such schemes on an entire country based on any type of philosophical construct (marxist, socialist, libertarian, anarchist, and yes capitalist).
Agreed again. I'm not suggesting that everyone should be forced to adopt UBI, merely that a) the current response replicated around the world, of handouts to businesses and individuals, is UBI in all but name, and that b) given the first point, governments would be remiss not to look at implementing UBI trials as a possible route out of the coming economic storm, and a possible route to a more egalitarian future.
In the recent COVID mess, in the US, we've got numerous anecdotes of people stopping work/not going back to work the very moment government payout for doing nothing exceeded the income they got from the job they dropped.
Expanding that to the macro economic level, it would seem that the more a country moved toward UBI, the more it would be shrinking it's Economy and GDP.
