That argument has been lost woefully before it even started. Nobody has provided a convincing argument for this and it doesn't even make logical sense: this is the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. It's literally arguing that resources can be created out of nothing.

In reality UBI is a form of wealth redistribution. That's all. The money being handed out to non-workers for free represents resources that other working people are creating. Those people will get less for their work as more will be taken from them by the government, same as any tax and welfare system.

The belief that this will create new wealth is a form of magical thinking, which is why when pressed UBI advocates start talking about how everyone on UBI is going to become an artist or poet instead of just playing video games and screwing around on Instagram all day. If UBI thinking were true then we'd be drowning in stories about how people lost their job, went on welfare and very quickly found themselves the owner of a successful new business doing the things they always loved.

But virtually no such stories are to be found anywhere. People who are on welfare today don't typically start spontaneously creating wealth. That's why there's an entire enforcement infrastructure in place, just to ensure they start doing anything productive at all.

Non-citizens of a country are workers, wealth generators and tax payers too, if you hadn't noticed

You're implicitly making assumptions you aren't stating, which is something UBI advocates do a lot.

Think about it. Your statement is logically very wrong: the vast majority of people in the world who are not citizens of a country don't live there and never have, thus are certainly not workers, wealth generators or tax payers for that country.

What you mean is "non-citizens who are permanent residents" or some approximation of that, but you aren't saying it, and as discussed elsewhere in this sub-thread UBI advocates don't agree on who would actually be eligible to receive it.

Moreover to stop UBI degrading into giving out free money to the entire world, the concepts of citizenship and residency would need to be much tighter than they are today. A border wall wouldn't cut it because suddenly anyone who made it past the wall would have a flow of income they could cut a corrupt border guard or immigration officer in on, so you'd suddenly need a much tougher enforcement infrastructure. "Immigration is wonderful, let's have way more of it" would have to stop immediately because otherwise it would actually be giving money to the whole world.

My statements refer to non-citizens living in a country and subject to the country's systems. The "logic" you point out is wrong is only wrong when you delete all the context surrounding them and take them to mean things they are obviously not intended to mean.

Besides that, the motivation underlying your observation on is silly and reflects nobody's intent. The vast majority of people who don't live in a country are simply irrelevant to the discussion; they don't need to be wealth generators or tax payers in a country where they would not be in receipt of UBI from that country.

> The belief that this will create new wealth is a form of magical thinking

It depends greatly on how you define wealth. All definitions of wealth encode implicit assumptions about what is desirable and who should get it; in a nutshell, they encode values.

If you're defining wealth as money or capital, you're encoding the assumption that more money or capital should guide decision-making about who gets to live a happy life.

Although I don't advocate that approach as the driving ideal, as it is not what I'd call "actual wealth", as long as it's a requirement asked for by most people wanting it that way (or believing it has to be), I would put the effort into developing systems around UBI, such as for example improving education and work opportunities to go alongside it, such that it resulted in net gain in money or capital within the country's system of economic measurements as well.

Yes, I do believe that's possible. No, I don't assume it. It requires being smart about building something new, not an act of passively assuming something happens by magic.

However you look at it, the belief that non-UBI systems result in more wealth than UBI systems is an equally unfounded assumption and therefore a form of magical thinking too.

In my opinion the smart way forward in the midst of so many unfounded assumptions is to recognise that's what they are, and having done that, constructively build systems based on what we decide is right, combined with what we believe can actually work. (But I'm an engineer; figuring out how to make new things happen in the midst of cultural inertia is what I do, so I would think that way.)

I assert that UBI is worth taking seriously because better values, and therefore my definition of what we should define as civilisational wealth, includes personal safety, basic freedom and dignity for all people.

It is not actually about money, it is about something we should endeavor to create if we can find a way to do it, because it is the right thing to do. Nor is it about wealth distribution despite the first instinct of many to think it is. It is in fact about smart investment. The goal, the objective function, is to end up receiving from people more than they are given, yet to do so in a way that upholds basic quality of life, universal values, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, that sort of thing.

That is why I tie it to idealistic basics like the USA's bill of rights, because so many people claim to believe in those rights and refer to them as motivation behind their personal ideology, but when it comes down to it, they hold a hypocritical view on this.

The system we have at the moment creates an entirely artifical underclass who are quintessentially citizens, but not legally citizens (or permanent residents or however you want to slice-and-dice definitions), and who are prevented from contributing as much as they would to the country they participate in. The system we have at the moment limits the country's overall wealth, through a belief that preventing people from working and trading, as well as preventing their access to support systems, will somehow result in greater wealth for the country, which is obviously wrong when you stop to think about it.

> What you mean is "non-citizens who are permanent residents" or some approximation of that, but you aren't saying it, and as discussed elsewhere in this sub-thread UBI advocates don't agree on who would actually be eligible to receive it.

Well, I was responding to someone else who talked about non-citizens, so my response is colored by that, to challenge the incredibly widespread trope that "non-citizens" is a fine shorthand for people who don't deserve the same basic rights as other people because they did something wrong.

What I mean when advocating UBI is non-citizens who live in a country and are subject to all the country's other "universal" systems, such as bill of rights, rule of law, financial economy, trading laws, etc. I have said it explicitly and clearly in my other comments.

Of course UBI advocates don't agree on everything. It's a sign of thinking, and of constructive compromise. It is not an argument for or against anything, but it sounds like you think it is.

> Moreover to stop UBI degrading into giving out free money to the entire world,

You're implicitly making a lot of assumptions you aren't stating, which is something anti-UBI advocates do a lot...