Yes, this. It’s weird for me to say that UBI makes people vulnerable to coercive control when a big part of the motivation behind a UBI is to eliminate such coercive control. That this might be democratically untenable in practice is a valid argument, but as the OP says themselves, the coerciveness and abuses already exist in current, conditional forms of social security. So that sounds to me like an argument for trying to move towards more unconditional systems, even if this was politically challenging at first. (In fact, I frequently hear people saying something like “and this is why we need a UBI” when reading about dysfunctions and abuses in existing social security systems—those are one of the biggest reasons why many people I know are UBI supporters.)
Yes, this. It’s weird for me to say that UBI makes people vulnerable to coercive control when a big part of the motivation behind a UBI is to eliminate such coercive control. That this might be democratically untenable in practice is a valid argument, but as the OP says themselves, the coerciveness and abuses already exist in current, conditional forms of social security. So that sounds to me like an argument for trying to move towards more unconditional systems, even if this was politically challenging at first. (In fact, I frequently hear people saying something like “and this is why we need a UBI” when reading about dysfunctions and abuses in existing social security systems—those are one of the biggest reasons why many people I know are UBI supporters.)