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.
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.
This is similar to the current situation, where being unemployed means you have a lot of time to post on the internet and influence elections.