Your heart’s in the right place, but many of your a priori assumptions flawed and your argument weak.
You need to look more closely at human psychology — most specifically the nature of Cluster B personality disorders (especially the neurological bases thereof).
You need to lift your analysis beyond the parochialism of US exceptionalism — with which this entire piece reeks to high Heaven, I’m afraid.
You need to have a good look into Systemantics and learn how systems (including human populations) work, before deciding that something like UBI must work even in principle. Trust me, it can’t: it will inevitably drift, evolve, mutate … and will, furthermore, be shaped by the environment in which it does so — in an otherwise unchanged Capitalist society, this means that all that will inevitably happen is that the cost of living will increase to take account of the baseline UBI.
The way things currently are is unethical, immoral, yes, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it is an engineering problem; it isn’t … it’s a people problem …
… Human nature is not an engineering problem nor is it a computer game puzzle to be solved by getting people to do the right things in the right order. People are not units of social and economic activity: they are complex systems in their own right; each a world of their own, with their own functions and dysfunctions.
