How's that?
> The right question is "how do we unlock the economy's prosperity-maximizing capacity?"
Asked and answered: free-market capitalism. Nothing has resulted in the sort of rapid prosperity we've seen recently with market capitalism spreading globally.
Kind of. Free-market capitalism has advantages in some situations. But you also have markets that "freely" tend toward monopolies or oligopolies, which end up leaving the majority of consumers in the lurch.
Over time, most systems including markets will be gamed so that certain elites reproduce their privilege at the expense of their fellows. This is true of free markets just as it is true of command economies.
But prosperity for whom, most people aren't satisfied with a system that drastically increases the GDP of their country but where they as an individual don't increase their standard of life at all. As globalization and technological progress increase, prosperity will result but it will become more and more concentrated. When you totally sacrifice 10% of peoples wealth (say Detroit auto workers) to make the other 90% better off and you do it over and over again, you're going to end with an extremely wealthy elite of people who snuck past ever being part of the 10%.
It's what I'm working on right now: http://www.greshm.org
> > The right question is "how do we unlock the economy's prosperity-maximizing capacity?"
> Asked and answered: free-market capitalism. Nothing has resulted in the sort of rapid prosperity we've seen recently with market capitalism spreading globally.
Capitalism can't exist without government and government can't exist without capitalism. They are yin and yang. I agree with you that capitalism is an important piece of the puzzle. By providing people with a basic income, we can make sure capitalism reaches its full potential in supporting social prosperity.
Nothing about UBI is opposed to free markets, unless you think paying taxes is not compatible with free-market capitalism.