Well, your revised position is much more reasonable. Score one for discourse.

I still completely disagree with your insistence that making a claim you can't support well is a good idea. C'est la vie.

I think it would be better if only intelligent people made decisions for other people, but I have yet to hear any ethical, or maybe moral is the better word, ways to enforce any kind of such system in practice.

My last little quibble with your revised criteria is that there are very few types of management of large masses of people that can't be considered a form of government/politics. Seems like you're triangulating on the CEOs or owners of large companies. If that's the case, then I'll politely disagree with you - I would trust academics with less vested interest to provide more intelligent and more objective positions on economic policy. Important to note: I said LESS vested interest (than corporate magnates), not none at all. I would say that rank-and-file academia have less vested interest in economic policy than the average CEO, as an example.

Completely agree that politicians' opinions on economic policy are not worth repeating, much less forming one's own opinion on.

Edit: p3, 'little' => 'few'

The fact that you can't back up an over-broad negative claim is a clue that you should not make it. That's exactly my point.

And I'm confused by your approach to intellectual gatekeeping. Does discussing the economics of universal basic income require expertise at economics and all other types of expertise don't provide any credibility at all, or do you need to be a hammer-wielding bridge builder? I'd wager that the number of economics PhDs that have sizeable construction experience is low enough that if we let only them discuss economic policy we'd have a pretty short discussion. More directly, it feels like you're moving the goalposts though: you said that the people who came up with 'the idea' had no work experience or relevant education. You didn't say that they had no 'construction' experience or 'economics' education, you said work experience or relevant education. Someone with public policy education who works in government has both relevant education and relevant work experience to discuss the idea of public policy like UBI. If you disagree, I'd love to know what criteria exactly you were implying when you made your over-broad, negative, impossible to support claim.

First: you are the one who made the claim, if we're being rational it's on you to support your claim.

But since it's so incredibly easy to demonstrate how wrong you are, I'll take a few seconds to educate you in front of the rest of the thread. A few seconds of review on the UBI wikipedia page shows:

Julius Caesar implemented a 100 denarii UBI for common roman citizens (https://books.google.com/books?id=aSmr_bVR2-kC).

He had a full-time job I think. May have had a bit of education.

Saint Thomas More wrote about a fictional society that explored the concept in Utopia (What Money Can Buy: The promise of a universal basic income – and its limitations, The Nation magazine). He had some education: he was a lawyer, judge and statesman.

Juan Luis Vive's, who was advocating a municipal -level UBI in Spain before Thomas Paine and others picked up the theme was educated at the university of Paris, and worked as a professor at some of the most distinguished universities in Europe at the time.

Most of the modern thinkers like Bertrand Russel and C.H. Douglass who publicly advocates for something like UBI had degrees.

If you'd like to take the time to see the magnitude of your wrongness, you can peruse this list too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal_basic_income . There are a lot of people with jobs and letters after their names on that list.

If I've sounded a little bit harsh here, it's because I want to emphasize your intellectual laziness, and try to encourage you and others not to make unsupported claims then incorrectly place the burden of proof on people who rightly call them out. If society operated the way you're operating, we would be in a lot of trouble.

Do better.

The fundamental problem of economics is that human wants are infinite and resources are not. If you accept the most fundamental concept of economics, then you understand that the economy is not driven by the finite requirements of the needs of individual humans to live, but the infinite demands of human wants.

I have never seen a UBI proposal that suggests the amount of income should be more than a reasonable estimate of the needs of a person for basic subsistence, health care, and in some cases postsecondary education.

This is the underlying principle behind all of the other answers here, like 'people won't just stop working because they have $16k/year', etc...

You are wildly incorrect. My only question is whether you made this up or read/heard it somewhere.