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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

There is a big contingent that believes UBI would only increase "laziness". How are you supposed to staff an incredibly shitty low paying job if people aren't literally starving? Offering more money or better working conditions is a nonstarter, they would rather just move the work offshore.

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I can't tell if this is satire, so I'll respond to it as though it is not.

> How are you supposed to staff an incredibly shitty low paying job if people aren't literally starving?

Why should anyone be forced to do that shitty of a job? Why can't the wage be increased and/or the quality of treatment be increased?

> Offering more money or better working conditions is a nonstarter, they would rather just move the work offshore.

This works for things like software developers, but not for the majority of food & service industry.

> Why should anyone be forced to do that shitty of a job? Why can't the wage be increased and/or the quality of treatment be increased?

Because if you did that we wouldn't have billionaires.

> Because if you did that we wouldn't have billionaires.

that sounds like a good thing

Also a strong contingent that believes it makes poor macroeconomic sense as it simply increases inflation with no gains (but probable losses) in net societal standard of living.

This is of course ridiculous. UBI money is much more likely to be spent increasing the velocity of money in the economy than if it were spent bailing out companies. It's very hard to run a consumer economy whilst making the consumers too poor to afford to spend much.

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