Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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> However UBI doesn't solve the problem of debt still piping the cash back into the hands of banks and other financial institutions.

That isn't a problem it's expected to solve. It's a completely independent problem that already happens whether you have a UBI or not.

The solutions there are likewise independent. Build more housing so it isn't supply constrained and doesn't increase in price to consume any gains made by the working class. Stop issuing student loans (students now have a UBI and don't need them), because student loans inflate the cost of college relative to other things which loans aren't available for. A UBI doesn't do that because the money isn't only available when spend on college.

> An actor is still a single actor, so if one actor has an over aggregation of wealth and has trouble spending it effectively the potential of that wealth is wasted when at least some actors don't have enough.

That's not how money works. Money in a bank account isn't being "wasted" because it isn't consuming resources, and if hoarding is causing currency scarcity (i.e. deflation) then additional money can easily be printed.

> So surely trillions of dollars of UBI injected directly into the hands of the poor will stimulate the economy. But for how long until the cash starts to aggregate again into slower pools of cash where throughput is limited?

For as long as they keep getting the UBI. Where do you think the money to fund it would come from?

Re. Money in a bank account not contributing to scarcity: I think that logic checks out when you observe money as a resource in isolation.

If you think of Money as a proxy for "captured value," then one way to look at it is how much "captured value" is "captured opportunity for wealth creation," which has a certain distribution % chance across the entire population.

In that sense, total aggregate money at any point in time can be viewed as zero-sum.

Suppose the government prints a hundred trillion dollars, buries it in the ground for 50 years and then digs it up and burns it in a furnace.

Notice how printing a hundred trillion dollars would normally be expected to cause a lot of inflation, but doing the above doesn't do that. It wouldn't have been any different if they had printed monopoly money instead of real money, because it doesn't get spent.

The opportunity for wealth creation is in raw materials and labor force. We measure those things in dollars because dollars are fungible and we want to be able to compare them to each other but the green paper isn't the prize, it's only a token that represents the prize. If some of the money is removed from circulation then the rest of it is worth more. It costs fewer dollars to buy an hour of labor, but there are still the same number of hours of labor available to buy. This is deflation, which is bad for various reasons, but deflation can be countered by printing money.

Not buying stuff with your money doesn't destroy the stuff, it only causes somebody other than you to have the stuff. This is only worse if what you'd have done with it is better than what they do with it.

This was such an excellent way of illustrating your point. Thank you for sharing

Land tax is better than more housing. A lot of housing is not used very well.

What do you think the point of a land tax is? It's to get people to build more housing, because it's more profitable to build taller buildings when they have the same tax burden as single story buildings or empty lots instead of having most of the returns from new construction eaten by property taxes.

But that doesn't work if building more housing is still prohibited by zoning.

It is also for making under-utilised property already built up, being used in more productive ways.

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