"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption"
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.
Most of the corruption I have in mind comes from the banking system and the system of government bribery we euphemistically call “lobbying”.
If we positively mandate full reserve free banking with no central bank and no state issued currency, that would eliminate I think all of the banking corruption I have in mind. I’m not sure about usury under the classical definition, if we run into problems still that might have to go too (though I do see downsides to innovation because loans are like crack cocaine for innovation, complete with the overdose deaths).
Lobbying is more difficult to make illegal because influence is much more nuanced than first-order* banking and influence will route around basically any protections given enough time. But today we don’t even try to make it illegal. Perhaps a meta-scheme where the lobbying rules periodically change according to some secret sequence could disrupt things enough to make it difficult to route around.
* First order in the sense that much of the complexity comes from playing with the primitives we have today and not from the primitives themselves, and the primitives I prefer are much clunkier to play with.
If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the general populace will be the failure that you're saying can't happen. This seems inevitable without an intervening event to reset things.
With that said, I don't think your concerns are unreasonable, and I'm not sure UBI by itself could solve anything. At a minimum price controls or government administering of food and housing would be necessary to keep prices from rising in response to the influx of cash everyone would receive, but the problem of people not working does seem like a big potential issue.
I believe there have been studies to the contrary, but those studies necessarily miss the universal part of ubi, so they don't have the negative feedback loops that could spring up in a real implementation.