Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

I'm not really contesting what the right measure is, I'm pointing out how substantially different the two are and that its important to be clear which one you're using.

I assume HN users are American unless informed otherwise. I'm glad that your health insurance bureaucrats can make a salary, but it's nonsense to believe that's a good way to run a society, even if it is profitable for some or can be deemed to be "free-market provision". There are better models that still generate income for pharma and doctors and nurses.

America made the car part of its identity. Your society was moulded by automotive lobbying in the twentieth century, on the hill and in town planning. It's great that car makers can generate income, but they've mugged you. All the mandatory spending on that sector could be optional, and the rational actors in your economy could use that money to maximise their personal profit functions in a way that encourages entrepreneurs to create new value.

It simply should not cost six figures to turn a school graduate into a doctor or lawyer. It's great that universities generate income and employ people, but you made bad choices there. A professor spends 10-20 hours a week teaching a class of fifty - research grants come from industry - where's the fucking money gone?

House builders deserve to get paid, but when you condemn a generation to rent slavery, you curtail their economic activity, making yourselves much poorer collectively and individually than you would be if your young could afford to take part in other parts of the economy. It's not like your rent-seekers can't cream income from other capital investments, there are ways to turn money into more money that increase liquidity for businesses. Housing isn't mandated by the laws of the universe to be an income stream.

If we translate Maslow's pyramid into goods and services, at the bottom we have groceries - which moooost people can afford, yay, you win a point; then housing, which is touch-and-go for a large minority; then leisure time and retirement planning and non-vocational education, which are enjoyed by only the wealthy.

And this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist... where the individuals in question are specifically rich and powerful ones. So you have apparently phenomenal GDP per capita but only 90% functional literacy, and lots of you die indigent because you got cancer. That GDP, I assert, is fucking fictitious. I'm sure America is rich one way or the other but it looks like the books are being cooked. If you claim that a university degree is $50k then your claim of $50k GDP is bollocks. Where is the actual production that you write down as $10k for having a broken arm set?

John Galt shat in your mouths and you're calling it stew.

Sorry if this rambled. GP, please let me know if I've fleshed out your point or missed it entirely.

If people have more money, won't it just increase the prices of things?

If only things were so black and white as suggested by your rhetoric.

A consumer who buys the same things as they were buying before, just at cheaper prices, is better off, even by your criteria. Nobody holds a gun to people's heads and forces them to buy "unnecessary luxuries".

A consumer who chooses to spend additional money on what you are pleased to call "unnecessary luxuries" that they could not buy at all before, because nobody was selling them, is also better off--not by your gerrymandered criterion, but by the standard criterion of economists, from those "60 year old textbooks" to today: they have options they didn't have before, and they are choosing to exercise those options. That is what "wealth" is--people having more choices.

> Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!

I said "free market", not capitalism. They're not the same thing. Large supermarket chains happen to be an example of both, but not all examples work out that way.

In fact, even the large supermarket chain example is not completely a free market example, because the government messes with food prices by subsidizing particular food crops in order to favor large agribusinesses over small farmers. To the extent that helped to enable large supermarket chains to undercut local grocery stores, that is an illustration of capitalism being against free markets.