Most other demographics have very a different perspective on that concept, and for good reason.
There will be cataclysmic changes ahead if we don't seriously reconsider, well, everything about society. Under the current way of thinking, millions of people will get sent to the glue factory - to persist in your horse analogy here.
I have no idea how to solve this problem. My cousin's husband is a truck driver. He makes a six figure income running between Indy and Chicago (bang, bang). He's going to retire before they can get rid of him, but this is a huge issue.
I tried to explain this problem to my father, who's a CPA. I've pointed out that his firm can get by with a dramatically smaller office than it use to due to tech. Same's true for his lawyer friends. I pointed out that the law firms are not training the next generation like they use to since they use fewer low-level lawyers for research thanks to Lexus Nexus. Account is next.
I'm not a huge fan of UBI since I think that makes people slaves of their State. We've seen such enslavement in the US under welfare programs. We've set the program up to lock people in. If they try to get out, they will lose benefits (donut hole issue). I think UBI is like that, but worse.
When America will be able to shake off its own mythology about this notion of the "State" as an inherently bad actor - then, perhaps, America will be able to get out of the current rut it's stuck in.
Yes, the "State" can be bad (I should know, I grew up in an actual bad "State" in the Eastern Bloc before the revolutions). But at the other extreme, societies can sabotage themselves from within, trigger the social equivalent of an autoimmune disease, and collapse from endemic distrust in the system - which to me is pretty clearly the direction America is going now.
There surely is a better middle ground somewhere.
I'm not actually sure its a practical option, but I don't see 'enslavement' as being one of it's downsides - where's the 'lock in'?
The closest real problem I can think of is not being able to move to a $15/hr minimum wage city from a poor area because you don't have the starting capital to buy the basics there.
Bad policy structuring, because welfare programs are legacy programs and were designed when Economics was still in its infancy.
Also keep in mind that the welfare population is a minority. It's similar to the bank anecdote - if you owe the bank $1000, you have a problem, if you owe the bank $10,000,000, the bank has a problem.
When tens of millions of people in a country with gun ownership depend on UBI - any government structure that tries to reduce benefits or eliminate it will become a target of the masses.
