Molson Hart

Could we have a universal basic income, economically speaking? Yes. Are we going to? Probably not. Why? We could have had it at many points in history and we never did. Very often a lot of people are not strictly needed for the production process. Examples:

Ancient Egyptians didn't really need the pyramids. Medieval European didn't really need the crusades. Modern USA doesn't really need the gigantic healthcare administration system it has. European/Japanese corps don't really need those they can't fire legally.

Communism shares a lot in common with UBI no? And maybe the reason why we never had it is that, without IT, it's not practical.

It has a few things in common. But UBI doesn't deny markets, private property, doesn't advocate central planning, doesn't promote full or even medium equality, so i'd say it's fairly different.

Dejure communism is like that but defacto isn't it kind of just UBI with economic activity going black market?

A little bit. But 1) the black market is capped (you can't be big). With UBI you can still be the CEO of Google. 2) In communism actual confiscations, forced evictions were fairly common. 3) Govt directly spent much of the GDP (e.g. on military) instead of subsidising people.

A little bit off topic but a very interesting thing i'm researching. In Germany the gov. redistributes ~45% of the GDP, but the federal budget is only ~10%. The rest goes to states (10%), municipalities (10%), individuals through social security (15%).