Microblog Memes

For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.

You may choose to have a $2000 cost of living, but you would choose that too through a pay raise. You could be empowered to keep $1000 cost of living, and there would be more apartments like "yours" if everyone else is moving up in lifestyle.

UBI gives you more choices. If you think everyone else is passive, just paying what they are told, you can use the opportunity to build more affordable life options for people, including easy access to loans from all of the extra money getting spent.

If sellers can fix prices so easily they're a cartel. Your whole economy is way fucked in that case so you definately need radical reform of one type or another, UBI is the least of your worries. Paying monopoly prices for everything is your big problem, you do need to get on with effective anti-trust action - or other radical market reform.

Even if no prosecution due to regulatory capture and so on though, a cartel of enough oligopolists in inherently unstable and they have to work hard to keep up the cooperation, it becomes a complex situation but underying it, the first one to cut prices will sell way more units and eat the others market share . This doesn't work all the time in all industries, but general competetive pressure does sometimes work to mediate excess profits in some circumstances.

Now, if you'd picked a broken market like rents and said landlords fix rental prices higher, yes - dysfunctional market, high barriers to entry, no real liquidity, rare transactions, powerful intermediators, weak ill informed buyers; yes such a market probably would benefit from price regulation or increasing social housing provision.

I'd love to see the evidence for the 1:1 happening in practice. I suspect it's someone's perverse-dream, very strong assumptions about universal sellers power and consumers total inability to substitute.

This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.

It's the guaranteed part that makes a difference. If they know they can at least buy toiletries or whatever with the money.

I don't understand the cost of living part? Are they raising the prices randomly? Is it because more people are buying stuff, so there's more demand? Then more jobs are created. It's a very vague question.