Comment by johng
Don't mean to be insensitive but payments to Native Americans has been a long running UBI experiment, has it not?
I grew up near a reservation, and I can tell you --- it's not good. I don't think many people can point out reservations that are doing well except for casino money.
Free government money, I believe, has systematically destroyed the people over the generations.
I think it was the forced relocation of Native Americans to the worst possible land with no natural resources that destroyed them over generations, not the little free government money they received. If they had no opportunity to extract wealth from the land, and they were outside population centers (who were also highly discriminatory against them), then they had very few options.
(These days wealth is not necessarily created by extracting value from physical resources, but that is a very recent development.)