Giving everyone their own money for, say healthcare costs, and having them navigate markets alone... achieves exactly the kind of divide-and-conquer that price-gouging pharmaceutical companies and hospitals have wet dreams about.
The only good UBI supplements, but does not replace, most existing social welfare programs.
Replacing existing programs just creates an open season for vultures.
For example, you go into the hospital for abdominal pain, but it turns out that you need a massive orthopedic surgery to fix a congenital issue that only 2 surgeons in your area can perform (true story). Or you are a severe diabetes or lupus sufferer who has routine hospitalizations for a variety of infections you get at random due to their underlying condition. Need a tooth filling replaced? Of course, shop around. Need emergency dental surgery because you had traumatic facial impact playing soccer? Not so much. Emergency treatments to sick geriatric patients to extend their lives by weeks and months: also very expensive.
Routine doctor's office visits to remove a wart from your foot, or diagnose a sore throat, which you can shop around for, are not where the high costs comes from.
Yet those do have insanely high costs as well, as compared to the rest of the economy. We live in an economy where medicine tends to get more expensive, rather than less, i.e: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/diabetes/u-s-insulin-costs-pa....
Doesn't it make sense to figure out why the basics are getting more expensive, before suggesting we engage in a national price-fixing experiment?
the other aspect is, no amount of ubi is going to cover huge medical costs that the current u.s system incurs, as well as higher education for those thst really do want to improve themselves and contribute
so (i think) ubi isnt a bad idea, but it needs to be coupled with other structural reforms and price controls to prevent being a huge potential diaster
I don't buy this argument. Businesses that do this would be leaving money on the table: namely the poor people that were outside of their total addressable market. Whereas before those folks would never have been able to provide revenue, with more cash in their pockets, they are now potential consumers. Increasing prices just maintains the same TAM for no real reason — you can make more revenue by serving the newly minted consumers.
The only good/service for which this breaks down is housing, for which there is a true supply scarcity — but even that ceases to be true in a regime with proper zoning reform (like Japan).
While advertisers like to claim that they are merely improving distribution of information (bringing us closer to that mythical "perfect information" assumption about competitive markets), in practice they mostly do the opposite.
That is, taking advantage of cognitive biases to sell people things they don't need, increasing net market participant irrationality.
Not nearly as much as it needs to be. Indiana imports 90% of its calories. What does it take to get vegetables grown near Indianapolis?
> our food supply is highly distributed.
I meant this in the sense of diversity if firms, not geographically. We've certainly seen consolidation with some of the bigger agri-conglomerates, and the trends are worrying, but we are nowhere near monopolization of the industry as a whole.
From Wikipedia:
> The 2012 US Census of Agriculture indicates that 5.06 percent of US farms are corporate farms. These include family corporations (4.51 percent) and non-family corporations (0.55 percent). Of the family farm corporations, 98 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Of the non-family farm corporations, 90 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area. Family farms (including family corporate farms) account for 96.7 percent of US farms and 89 percent of US farmland area;[17] a USDA study estimated that family farms accounted for 85 percent of US gross farm income in 2011.
There are plenty of issues with our food supply system. But I don't think we need to worry about monopolies raising prices unilaterally. The OP thought we needed price controls to keep food costs low. I don't think this in the case. The problems are instead on the poverty side of the equation. Who has the money to pay for our (generally pretty cheap) food? The are too many that are food insecure, not because groceries are expensive, but because they are in poverty.
US government injected about 3 trillion worth of liquidity into the country since the start of the coronavirus, similar to how UBI of $1000/month to every single adult would cost. And did you see any price rise?