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Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

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Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#621

Post by deelly »

arunkd13 wrote: post #600
onion2k wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. One aspect of UBI is that poor people would be less at the mercy of the rich. If you're a poor person now you absolutely have to try to keep your horrible job else you'll lost the ability to pay rent and buy food. You have to take all the cra…

Employees should not depend on the government for their ability to walk away from a job. They should depend on real assets that help them live more self sufficiently outside of their employment. This should include family, friend and other forms of community ties.

Yes, this idea is so simple but sometime is so hard to grasp. Also, people should not kill each other.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#622

Post by mcv »

zpeti wrote: post #548
habosa wrote: post #526

I like the simple argument made here about UBI enabling efficient consumption. I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic. 1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages. 2. Predator…

Something no one ever talks about with UBI is how the effects will be eliminated in a few years. The very things poorer people would buy from it would get more expensive by the UBI proportion, it will just be inflated away. When everyone has an extra $1000 do you really think landlords won’t increase rent? The price of food and clothing won’t increase? When literally an entire country is richer by this amount? UBI do…

Not everybody will get an extra $1000. For people on welfare, social security, etc. UBI will mostly just replace that. The big advantage is that people who start to work from a position of unemployment don't lose that money and won't get punished for working. The other big advantage is that you save a lot on bureaucracy figuring out who is entitled to what according to which rule, because everybody gets the same.

It will help the working poor a lot, but any market where there's real competition, that competition will continue to keep prices low. If prices go up anywhere, that's a sign that in that market, there's no real competition.

Or it could be that wages go up due to basic income, in which case costs and prices will indeed go up, but then there will be a good reason for it.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#623

Post by mmmnnn6789698 »

> This is why wealth inequality soared when capitalism went global in the 20th century... This led to massive accumulations of wealth and the biggest wealth gap in history.

Is he saying that wealth was better distributed in prior centuries ? Is he discarding the huge social progress in the 20th ?

> The third solution is a Universal Basic Income, where countries distribute some wealth to all residents equally.

Who's paying ? "The countries" ? Charming way to say "the middle class".

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#624

Post by ivalm »

arunkd13 wrote: post #600
onion2k wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. One aspect of UBI is that poor people would be less at the mercy of the rich. If you're a poor person now you absolutely have to try to keep your horrible job else you'll lost the ability to pay rent and buy food. You have to take all the cra…

Employees should not depend on the government for their ability to walk away from a job. They should depend on real assets that help them live more self sufficiently outside of their employment. This should include family, friend and other forms of community ties.

But they factually don’t have these real assets and can’t gain them. This is why poverty can trap people.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#625

Post by ohgodplsno »

mcv wrote: post #611
scotty79 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another concern. What will stop landlords from increasing the rent by high percentage of basic income? Suppliers always price their goods as high as they can for the specific values of supply, demand and competition, and none of those things will change. The customers will just have more money to pay for the right to live under a roof.

There are two options here: rent control, and the free market. If enough houses can be built, and basic income is high enough to pay free market prices, then any landlord who asks too high a price, will price themselves out of the market because there will be other cheaper houses. But for this it's vital that the supply of houses is unrestricted. Of course a landlord might bait and switch with low rent as you move in…

Housing cannot and will not be efficiently handled by the free market. It is a basic need. Noone will wait for a year before prices go down because landlord are now trying to outprice eachother. The response to overpriced housing is not "Eh, I'll guess I'll be homeless for a while", its "have no choice but to pay". Especially for something controlled by such a small portion of the population

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#626

Post by konschubert »

zpeti wrote: post #548
habosa wrote: post #526

I like the simple argument made here about UBI enabling efficient consumption. I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic. 1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages. 2. Predator…

Something no one ever talks about with UBI is how the effects will be eliminated in a few years. The very things poorer people would buy from it would get more expensive by the UBI proportion, it will just be inflated away. When everyone has an extra $1000 do you really think landlords won’t increase rent? The price of food and clothing won’t increase? When literally an entire country is richer by this amount? UBI do…

If everyone has 1000 Euro more, for some people that’s 200% more than before, for others it’s 1% more.

This means that the amount of money overall does not increase as much as the amount of money poor people have.

Therefore, even if there will be a bit of inflation, it won’t cancel the effect of UBI.

Those who earn a lot will have less than before (Because of inflation), but those who earn little or nothing will have more.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#627

Post by phantom0308 »

stiray wrote: post #587
habosa wrote: post #526

I like the simple argument made here about UBI enabling efficient consumption. I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic. 1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages. 2. Predator…

Even if I like the idea of UBI idealistically, I am worried about potential inflation. Once there is more money in the system (that before the UBI just wasnt there) the prices of basic things might rise and at the end the money you get from UBI will be a "new zero". I am not saying that this will happen but I think this is serious concern.

The entire world is stuck in a liquidity trap and we have negative real interest rates. No advanced economy has had north of the 2% target for a meaningful amount of time prior to the pandemic. Inflation is something to watch out for. IMO, deflation is the bigger concern.

Source: former deficit hawk convinced hyper-inflation was just around the corner for half a decade.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#628

Post by Fatalist_ma »

The argument was not convincing at all. He focuses on how UBI will let poor people to consume more. But will it help them produce more? I believe it will, but that needs explaining.

> If we can give companies overwhelming demand so they have to scale up production instead of spending all their money on advertising, we can have both happy companies making profit hand over fist, and happy consumers who get everything they desire.

lol... Consumers won't be able to buy "everything they desire" with UBI. And the UBI will be funded with the taxes payed by the companies, so not all of them will actually make more profit.

> The second solution is some sort of socialism, ...

And UBI is not "some sort of socialism"? O_o

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#629

Post by scotty79 »

mcv wrote: post #611
scotty79 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have another concern. What will stop landlords from increasing the rent by high percentage of basic income? Suppliers always price their goods as high as they can for the specific values of supply, demand and competition, and none of those things will change. The customers will just have more money to pay for the right to live under a roof.

There are two options here: rent control, and the free market. If enough houses can be built, and basic income is high enough to pay free market prices, then any landlord who asks too high a price, will price themselves out of the market because there will be other cheaper houses. But for this it's vital that the supply of houses is unrestricted. Of course a landlord might bait and switch with low rent as you move in…

Free market won't work. It doesn't work because you can't build enough houses. For the free market to work you'd have to build way more houses than people need because owning house without tenants is extremely cheap and you don't have to lower the rent (or sell it at lower price). You can just let it be unrented for quite a long time and still come ahead when tenant or buyer finally arrives.

I think you should just raise cost of owning additional houses so keeping them empty really hurts.

Rent control seems like government micromanagement that we want to avoid with BI.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#630

Post by xg15 »

If the only thing that matters is GDP growth (as the article tells pretty openly) and if UBI really only has the purpose to keep lower classes in the consumption loop (not because they need anything but so companies can keep selling stuff, so their revenue will grow, so the GDP will grow), couldn't this all be structured a lot more efficiently by automating consumption?

You could imagine an army of robot consumers who are each allotted some amount of monthly UBI and who are programmed to automatically buy products chosen by certain criteria (or at random).

Then you can combine this with fully automated production and you finally have a fully automated economy where the GDP growth rate is just a line in a config file...

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