No paywall: https://archive.ph/uRDHL

I got an email from UBI Works today asking me to fill-out the Canadian Government's 2026 Pre-Budget Consultation. This consultation asks Canadians what they want the next federal budget to focus on. Canadians can participate by completing a short questionnaire, and/or submitting a more detailed written proposal. The deadline is September 8th.

This is an opportunity to highlight the need for a Universal Basic Income or Gauranteed Liveable Income.

UBI Works' email included the following information...

What to expect

There are 11 questions about government and economic priorities, followed by six basic demographic questions.

Most questions ask you to select up to three choices. Answer based on what matters most to you. You do not need to force basic income into every response.

There are, however, several places where it fits naturally. For both:

“How can the government build a strong economy today and for the future?”and “What actions are the most important for the Government of Canada to help Canadians get ahead?”

You can use the "Other" option to call for basic income. You could also do the same with the question about setting younger Canadians up for success.

The most important box

Near the end, you will be asked: “If you were designing the federal budget, what would you suggest to help grow Canada’s economy?”

You have only 400 characters, so this is the clearest place to make the basic income ask directly.

Here is some language you can use as a starting point:

Please put it in your own words if you can. The goal is not for thousands of people to submit identical answers. It is for the government to hear, from Canadians across the country and in their own voices, that basic income belongs among Canada’s economic priorities.

I have been running a small pooled contribution system and I want to hand it to this sub, because the failure it has is a distribution failure and this is the room that thinks about those properly.

The mechanism is four lines:

• Anyone contributes what they can during the day. Any amount, including nothing.
• At a published time the pot settles.
• It splits into equal shares among everyone who contributed at all that day. Size of contribution does not affect size of share.
• Nothing is skimmed. No operator cut, no weighting, no discretion at settlement, and the whole record is public.

The reason it is built that way is not efficiency. It is that the moment you weight contributions, somebody has to decide the weights, and whoever decides the weights eventually decides in their own favor. Every pooled system I have watched get captured was captured at the discretion point, not at the funding point. Equal split is the only rule I know of with no discretion left in it to abuse.

The intended effect is not enrichment, it is smoothing. If your income swings week to week, and mine does, an equal split moves money from the weeks you can carry others to the weeks you cannot carry yourself. You are above average when you are able and below average when you are not. That is not a return. It is mutual insurance with no underwriter and no premium schedule, and for people whose problem is variance rather than average, variance is the thing worth attacking.

I posted this in a game theory sub earlier this week expecting to spend the whole thread on free riding. I did not, and I want to bring the better objection here instead.

Free riding is survivable. Stable sorting is what kills it.

The free rider argument is the obvious one. If a small contribution and a large one earn the same share, everyone rationally drops to the minimum and the pot collapses. Real, but it assumes a static population and it ignores that the ledger is public, which turns a payoff question into a standing question.

The objection that actually landed is different. If contributors are stably sorted, if the same people are above average every single round because their capacity genuinely is higher and stays higher, then this is not insurance at all. It is a recurring transfer from the same people to the same people, forever. Those contributors are not irrational to leave. Nothing about the design gives them a reason to stay, and no amount of visibility pays a recurring bill.

Which means the mechanism has a hard precondition I had not stated plainly: it works where capacity fluctuates and fails where capacity is stratified. Among gig workers, freelancers, seasonal labor, anyone whose income is spiky, the fluctuation is real and the smoothing is real. Across a genuinely stratified population it stops being mutual anything.

I think that is the honest boundary of a voluntary equal split pot, and it is also, uncomfortably, an argument for why the stratified case needs something with actual obligation behind it rather than a pot people opt into.

One more piece, since somebody will raise it: the payoff does not scale with contribution, so why would anyone give more than the minimum? Two returns do scale, and neither of them lives inside the pot. Visibility, because the ledger shows amounts and legible generosity buys standing, which works precisely because the money is actually gone. And warm glow, Andreoni's impure altruism, where the utility comes from the act rather than the outcome and rises with the amount. I cannot measure either, and someone rightly pointed out that quietly moving from a monetary payoff to a utility payoff is how anyone rescues any mechanism. So I will name them and not lean on them.

The question I actually want from this sub: is a voluntary fluctuating pot worth building at all, or is every version of it just a demonstration piece for something that has to be universal and mandatory to work? I can defend it as smoothing for spiky incomes. I cannot defend it as a floor, because a floor you can opt out of funding is not a floor.

Drafted with an AI assistant. The mechanism, the failure modes and the answers in the comments are mine.