Comment by twblalock

> Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would stop us from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?

In a democracy? Nothing can prevent that. Even if we wrote UBI into the constitution, it could always be amended. There are always going to be proposals to give some people different amounts of money than others under basic income, and some of those proposals will gain enough voter support to pass.

You may be interested in Tyler Cowen's post on this subject, which I posted about elsewhere in this thread: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...