@djc everything does, i guess, but i’d argue that from most values perspective, the universal benefit baseline makes more sense. the idea is that benefits cover some socially desirable cost or finance some socially useful activity. universality is then just straightforward accounting: who bears the cost or performs the activity? to her we pay the benefit. how/fron whom do we finance it becomes a separate question? 1/

@djc i guess the value substrate to means testing is “none of my business unless absolutely unavoidable”, including ignoring all positive externalities. we don’t think of financing socially desirable costs or activities. people make their own choices, and some of them lead to destitution. then, whether out of pity or concern about negative externalities, we decide whether a destitute class is virtuous enough to receive support. 2/

@djc that is to say, the values consistent with means testing are both very unusually libertarian — most people wouldn’t describe them as their own — and I think technocratically pretty indefensible. positive externalities are as real as negative externalities, a regime thay fails to subsidize the positive, just clips the worst negative will be an objectively poorer regime than that finances the positive and avoids the negative… 3/

@djc unless (like many libertarians) you see informational, bureaucratic, and/or tax driven deadweight costs that make inaction preferable to action despite much good that could in theory be done. universal benefits also minimize informational and bureaucratic costs (by taxing broadly through the existing tax system, sending benefits to whole crude classes rather than trying to make fine, detailed distinctions)… 4/

@djc so technocratically the only thing thay can really redeem means testing is a claim that taxation imposes very large deadweight costs that eg the burdens of child-rearing itself do not. which, for a parental benefit, would rely upon some notion that since parents choose to have kids, the welfare cost of financing them is much lower than other people paying the same money because they are meeting their own preference. 5/

@djc that’s not as much a value as an axiom, but it’s what you need to justify means testing. the affected class chose to be the affected class, their preferences are satisfied, they do not just bear the costs of the choice but its benefits, so covering the costs from others who do not enjoy its benefits would be unjust. /fin

@djc (i lied with “/fin”!) again, this implies positive externalities are ignored, the fact that other people’s kids will deliver the goods and services the childless will require in retirement never figures in. /reallyfin