Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

At least in New Zealand, those who can claim a benefit from the Government end up in a welfare trap, because we reduce welfare payments as you regain an income. There's no immediate financial benefit to you, the welfare recipient, in working 10-20 hours vs. not working at all.

There's a whole philosophical discussion involved in whether those people should have to work, but rightly or wrongly, a lot of societal and personal value is derived from employment. A UBI deletes the welfare trap, and allows people who exist on the margins/are incapable of full-time work to find and immediately benefit from employment again. Maybe the garbagemen will need to be paid more, but we should also see more part-time workers put their hands up.

A UBI would certainly change job markets; I'm not sure whether "distort" is the right word.

But also where I live, the garbage man is not a public employee, but an employee of a private garbage company. So my taxes don't need to change, instead my garbage bill goes up. That would be regressive, since a garbage bill is a higher percentage of poor people's income. But some poor people just don't pay the garbage man, and instead take their garbage to the landfill themselves, which is way way cheaper.

Incidentally, you can make the same argument about minimum wage increases - the cost of getting low wage work done increases, so prices increase. I don't want to get into an argument about the effectiveness of that, but the evidence generally suggests minimum wage works better than conservative naysayers sometimes claim.

A few centuries ago we didn't have lighting, refrigeration, microwaves, electric ovens, clothes washers and dryers, cheap food, even fruits were only seasonal whereas in many capitalist-favoring places in the world now you can buy them year round. You can eat meat for every meal.

The view from the kitchen alone makes us look like we live like kings from centuries past.

Not to disregard the downsides of capitalism - rent seeking being just one of many. But to say we aren't living in the luxuries of capitalism is disingenuous IMO.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_worl...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_Account_Program_...

so all goods and services that require said "dirty job" in the supply chain will go up in price. This eventually negates the UBI benefits, because the level of UBI no longer can sustain purchases of all the goods and services that it originally could due to the increases in prices.

So do you increase UBI to counter this? Or do you let it be, and UBI no longer pays enough to maintain the same level of living standard. In which case, people are now once again, forced economically, to work "dirty jobs" despite not wanting it.