Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

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None of what you posted is serious criticism of UBI.

> Prices rise due to increased consumer spending capability, to the point where you have to work again to get above the poverty line.

Governments will respond to economic factors that diminish purchasing power in order to maintain the effectiveness of UBI, as a part of UBI.

> Any realistic UBI is too low for people with special needs

Diminished support for disabled or sick people is not a part of UBI. UBI should become a part (within or on top of) of their support. Bureaucracy will still be diminished for non-disabled people.

> If the UBI is independent of local cost-of-living, it'll most likely be too low to survive on it in high COL areas

So people in those areas will have to have jobs. UBI still allows them to go quit their job and move out to the country if they want to subsist on it. UBI would go nicely paired with rent controls and maintaining individual purchase power, but it doesn't even need those things to be a net positive.

UBI should have been implemented 20-40 years ago, it will surely be necessary going forward, it's time to get on board.

> Governments will respond to economic factors that diminish purchasing power in order to maintain the effectiveness of UBI, as a part of UBI.

How? Using which political, economic, and financial tools? And what will be the side effects of those policies? That's exactly the point I was making: UBI proponents assume a downright utopian best-case scenario where everything works as planned (even though those plans are vague at best, and wishful fantasies at worst), and politicians and voters behave perfectly rational.

>> How? Using which political, economic, and financial tools? And what will be the side effects of those policies?

There's a simple answer for that: please look at communist Poland 1980-1989 - trying to counter raising prices with government intervention leads to supply crisis (since production is not economically viable anymore). Imagine all stores having nothing to sell, literally empty shelves, forcing common people to fight for scrapes.

That reminds me of a German joke about the German Democratic Republic ("East Germany"):

Ein Mann geht in ein Kaufhaus in der DDR. Er fragt den Verkäufer: "Gibt's hier keine Socken?" – "Nein, hier gibt's keine Hosen. Keine Socken gibt's in der zweiten Etage."

Translated (roughly): A man visits a department store in East Germany. He asks the shop assistant: "Do you have no socks here?" – "No, we have no trousers. No socks are on the second floor."

(The joke relies on the word order of German syntax; properly translated, the dialog would be:

"Don't you have any socks?" – "No, we don't have any trousers. No socks are on the second floor"

But then the joke doesn't really make sense anymore.)

Oh really? So when the United States subsidizes our otherwise non competitive corn industry, it leads to economic collapse?

When we control oil prices by using reserves and trading agreements, does that cause people to fight for scraps?

How about when we subsidize silicon chip manufacturing? Did that collapse society?

You cannot, in a serious conversation, compare Soviet Union economic policies to modern socialist ideas. It's just silly.

Subsidizing any industry is always bad for economy (because you are shifting money taken from good businesses to bad ones), it's just that the amount of subsidies given to corn industry, or even amount that can be given to chip manufacturing are nothing compared to US GDP. Try make that a general rule across the whole economy and see what happens.

"Modern socialist ideas" are basically the same ideas that were already tried in Soviet Union, just dressed in fancier words.

As an opponent of UBI you should know what economic and financial tools would be available, and then explain why they wouldn't work, rather than act like they don't exist. It would help your counter argument.

No, is the other way around. You claim UBI would work and the problems some of us said are not real problems because it could be solved. So now, it is your turn to explain which mechanisms would avoid those problems.

Otherwise I could say "erasing money would make us live like aristocrats" without explaining how or why, and you should try to figure out why I could think that way, what kind of tools and mechanisms I thought of and after that, explaining why it would not work. Obviously, I could say those are not the right tools for my idea, so you have no real counter arguments, yada yada yada...

Of course! government intervention in prices and supply and demand! How nobody thought about it before? Well, they did. And it failed spectacularly, as central planning of prices doesn't work due to the impossibility of getting all the information needed in time and the results of the analysis on time too in order to correct the market.

And as a proponent of UBI, YOU should explain how it would work, not the others. What financial tools or mechanisms would use a government to control the inflation or the rise in prices? I mean, even in the late Soviet Union had to look at capitalists countries to have an idea of the prices for basic products, because they coul not put a price that would make it work.

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