Why we should all have a basic income

Have you actually compared rents in cities like Houston to the same sized apartments in cities with more restrictive zoning? They're lower in Houston.

The reason people don't live in high rises in Texas cities is that they're so sprawled they don't need vertical construction. San Francisco has almost five times the population density of Houston even though Houston has almost three times as many people.

> How do property taxes discourage construction?

They discourage the property owners. If you own a ten story building on a lot zoned for twenty, adding the extra ten floors looks a lot more attractive before you subtract out the additional property taxes you'll owe forever if you do it.

This is a compounding problem because the property taxes are based on the property value but the property value is based on scarcity, so if housing units become scarce then property values (and thus property taxes) go up and you have to charge higher rents to justify new construction. Which allows rents to go even higher because there is less new construction which further increases property taxes and requires even higher rents to justify new construction and so on

Because cash you can spend somewhere else.

Suppose you like football. If the money is "student loans" then you can spend it by attending a school with a big fancy college football stadium and subsidized tickets for students. If the the money is cash then you can use it to go to that school instead of a less expensive one with no football stadium, or you can go to the less expensive school and use the money to buy NFL season tickets.

So when the money is student loans, people have only the first option and all the schools have to build big fancy football stadiums to attract students. But you can't do that on a per-student basis. And you can't directly buy college football tickets with student loan money but you can launder it through administration to subsidize them. So everybody who attends that school ends up paying for football even if all they really wanted was an education, and then people have to consider the quality of the school's football team when choosing schools instead of only the quality of their professors. It would have been better to have just let the students who like football use the money to buy NFL tickets.

And so on for twelve other categories of student loan money laundering colleges have to engage in to attract students.

> UBI also removes the advantage of centralized negotiating power that's beneficial in industries like healthcare. With Medicare or a private insurance company the $500 list price for doctor's exam can be negotiated down to $99.

There is no reason you can't use your UBI money to buy private insurance.

And the only reason the list price for those things is $500 is that everybody knows the scam. The buyer for the insurance company wants to look like a great negotiator to his boss, so the doctor's office claims everything costs five times as much as they actually want and the buyer gets to look like a big hero for whacking it down so much.

And in general insurance makes things cost more for the same reason colleges with fancy football stadiums are more expensive. People don't ask whether something is worth the cost when they're spending somebody else's money. If you're paying out of your own pocket, you ask if knowing the result of some test is really worth $1200 of your money. If the insurance company is paying for it, you run all the tests whether you need them or not.

By that logic one should bulldoze the existing 10-story building and stick to owning dirt lots, realizing enormous property tax savings along the way.

The reason you don't see entire cities converted into dirt lots is that in reality things don't work that way.

The developer that builds condos doesn't really have an opinion on property taxes because paying those will be up to condo owners. The developer that builds apartment towers intended for rent doesn't care because the rental operator will take over, and the assessment of a rental property is a function of existing cashflows and comparables, subject to change when assessed at too high of a value.

> property values (and thus property taxes) go up and you have to charge higher rents to justify new construction

In reality large-scale commercial build-outs do not depend on financing from existing renters. A property operator (the principal) typically contributes some cash but also brings in a variety of outside investors. The rest of the sum is raised via fixed-interest debt and is one of the largest areas of US commercial banking. As a rental property reaches stabilization point, the principal conducts another round of outside investments, this time in somewhat worse investor terms, as the property is de-risked and has relatively stable cash flows. The money is used to pay down the commercial loan to a reasonable LTV.

When the plans for a new project show up on the horizon, the fundraising cycle begins again, with principal contributing some "skin in the game", outside investors participating in the first round, and numbers from existing properties being used in a presentation deck sent to the bank in order to secure a new commercial loan.

If everybody financed by raising rents on existing renters, than apartments by some aggressively growing operators (let's say Avalon Bay) would be extremely expensive, while exact same apartments owned by conservatively stable operators (let's say Essex Property Trust) would be extremely cheap. We do not see that imbalance in the marketplace.

Even a small amount of charity would provide anybody who can't work at all with sufficient food. Just like how today data storage in hard drives is dirt cheap; and we can provide billions of bytes of storage at nominal cost.

Looking at current society, starvation and mass famines have decreased greatly. Malnutrition is the next concern.

So, in some sense we may have reached post-scarcity for food for a large portion of human population. But there is still scarcity for quality and healthy food, such as fruits and vegetables.