Hello, I’m not that informed about UBI, but here is my arguement:
Everyone gets some sort of income, but wouldn’t companies just subside the income by raising their prices? Also, do you believe capatilism can co-exist with UBI?
Hello, I’m not that informed about UBI, but here is my arguement:
Everyone gets some sort of income, but wouldn’t companies just subside the income by raising their prices? Also, do you believe capatilism can co-exist with UBI?
Yes… BUT I’d actually encourage people to consider an even better alternative, which is Universal Basic Services.
As you point out, giving people money is no guarantee that their spending power will be enough to cover their needs. I’ve heard it said that any UBI which is sufficient is unaffordable, and any that is affordable is insufficient. I think it’s still a policy we should experiment with, and I think even a small UBI could elevate poverty. But a more effective alternative is to try and provide essentials directly, free of cost.
What this looks like is publicly owned housing; a robust, fully-funded public education system that includes pre-K and higher ed; universal healthcare; and free food. Some of these – like housing and food – sound shocking and difficult, but to an earlier generation, so would the others. And we already have some of these programs for the very poor. The key to executing them is to bypass markets. Markets will always raise the cost of essentials because the demand is unlimited. Instead of paying private landlords for housing, the state or non-profit entities need to own the homes. There will still be costs associated with maintenance, but there need be no dividends or investor profits. Same with food. We might not be able to make everything in a grocery store free. But if you have well-run local gardens, they’ll actually produce a substantial amount of food that you can just put in baskets by the entrance and let people take from.
Unlike UBIs, which are inherently inflationary, UBS programs are deflationary. By offering free goods they create competition against market prices and make the stuff people still pay for (with a UBI) cheaper.
If you’d like to see how all of this works, go check out the tabletop RPG my friends developed at c/fullyautomatedrpg, or the world guide for the setting at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/resources.
Absolutely 100% worse. It creates an empire bureaucracy to distribute the subpar services under the same scarcity as subsidized housing today. 10 year+ wait in Toronto and other major cities, btw.
Cash means you can choose affordable housing that meets your needs, while balancing budget for food or other interests. Government cheese may not be as necessary to you compared to milk and eggs, or “better cheese”. Housing is especially corrupt and inadequate to subsidized distribution. You need to add income/asset conditionality on who can qualify even if almost everyone would like to get the discount. Its a great recipe to create ghetto neighbourhoods that a politician may wish to make worse in order to oppress the ghetto harder. You can’t escape the ghetto because you’ve got a cheap housing option. It makes other housing more expensive because “good neighbourhoods” have a premium when there are bad neighbourhoods.
UBS is everything that is wrong with our society, one step forward.
While universal healthcare is a proven cost saver, the other’s don’t need to be centralized/governmentalized. While the government/private sector can both build “soviet” style affordable housing, they can do so in a market system that provides affordable housing, while still providing a reasonable private profit margin, or government break even.
Education costs can be market based, when you give each family a stipend they can use for education. Only desperation would force you to send your child to a coal mine instead of school, but parents could choose to adequately feed their children and spend less on home school, with computers and online learning, then force a child that doesn’t want to be in school into a public institution. Baltimore/DC school districts spend $30k per pupil, largely to make a school to prison pipeline with excessive security needed to control kids who don’t want to be there.
UBI instead of UBS also means hope for young students who will be able to afford university if they are qualified, or otherwise afford surviving outside of a criminal gang support structure.
The issues that you’re pointing out are reasonable concerns, but I think you’re falling into a common mental pitfall that assumes that the implimentation must resemble the most similar past approach, while also decrying the irrationality of using those unsuccessful methods.
It doesn’t need to look like government cheese. It doesn’t need to look like “the projects”. All of those programs had systemic flaws that were specific, observable bad public policies.
Universal housing can look like the government acquiring existing apartments from disinterested landlords that are out of compliance and then granting them on a $1 lease in perpetuity to local neighborhood coops so long as they maintain it well. Universal food can look like mandates for grocery stores to provide non-profit collectives unfettered access to discarded items that are still perfectly edible instead of locking up dumpsters full of food that can feed people.
You can have a UBI too. I’m not shitting on the idea. But as you already pointed out, single payer healthcare is a great demonstration most people don’t even argue with. Implement a UBI, but where options exist for direct services, provide them and you won’t need nearly as large a UBI, and you can cut out tons of waste.
Free public transit is another great example. Do you want to have to include bus fare in the UBI? Or would it just make sense to make the buses and trains fare-free.
The university & school examples seem silly. Why give people a voucher instead of just reimbursing all accredited schools directly and let folks enroll anywhere without having to manage a budget? Just make them tuition free. Otherwise, you have to make a UBI large enough to pay all the administrators that exist just to process payments, and manage the size of vouchers… The UBI would go so much further if folks didn’t have to pay for things that don’t need market guidance at all. So many unnecessary middle-men.
UBIs make sense when you want to benefit from market guidance. They’re great for that, but for lots of things everyone uses or where consumer selection mechanics break down, there are tons of ways to make them free at the point of use. Is management and corruption a potential problem? Yes… regardless of which system you implement. So you might as well use the best tool for the given need and learn to do it well.
Not a complete fan, except that fines so large as the remedy is confiscation can be appropriate. No need to give away the confiscated property, though UBI would allow for tenant managed coops offering a fair bid. I’d rather see soviet style housing meant to provide a return for the builder, but affordable. UBI means there are no projects with “exclusive access” being for the troubled.
UBI is better. Nothing stopping grocery stores from taking advantage of non-profit collectives, compared to usual for profit alternatives. It’s in their interest to provide food quality/value.
Free public transit offers denser transit schedules, traffic reduction, better value for work and “touristy” outings. UBI solving homelessness helps avoid turning a “cheap shelter” into a “free shelter” for “undesirables” that may make transit uncomfortable to others.
Why give people a voucher instead of just reimbursing all accredited schools directly and let folks enroll anywhere without having to manage a budget?
Before university grades, you don’t need accredited schools as much as accredited testing. Internet/multimedia (30 years old revolution) has expanded education alternatives. Cash instead of vouchers. Spend as much as you want on education.
http://www.naturalfinance.net/2015/05/slashing-public-education-can-provide.html
For University grades, it is rationed, and there is a minimum aptitude level required to gain from the experience. Would Harvard be allowed to exist alongside a public tuition free abundant system? I support subsidizing post secondary education similar to Canada (maybe outdated) where a summer job could pay for tuition and books. UBI, though, is plenty to afford university dorm + tuition lifestyle, but perhaps, if you can get into Harvard, you might prefer additional student loans if you consider the education worth the tuition price. The magic of UBI, is that you get to consider the overall value of education instead of “student program” scams on the young and foolish.
To avoid an endless debate, I propose we agree that UBI is a good thing that we should test in more circumstances, and programs to provide more things free of cost (which do allow UBIs to achieve more spending power per dollar) are worth testing.
If such programs perform poorly in a trial, then it’s good that we tested them. And if some perform better than you expect, it’s also good that we tested them.
We need to test UBI the same way we need to test the abolition of slavery. It’s a delay to implementation, and some people wouldn’t like it.
I was talking about trials of universal services.
I gotta tell you: if you want to be the spokesperson for a movement, you need to learn how to build goodwill. You’re coming off as combative and needlessly hostile when I’m trying to find common ground.