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Comment by qiskit | Hacker News Reader

Instead of all these regulations, why not institute basic income. If every adult was given $2000 ( or whatever figure we come up with ) you wouldn't have to create so many laws. Minimum wage, work hours, retirement, diversity, etc laws would be unnecessary because it would be difficult to exploit people whose needs are met. Why pass hundreds of laws when you can pass 1 that solves all the problem?

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$2000 barely covers rent ( 1 br LA/SF). We’d also need rent control legislation to prevent rents from rising to absorb the UBI.

Apart from that I agree - UBI is the simplest, cheapest way to lift the population out of poverty.

The outcomes are fantastic - I recommend Rutger Bregman’s book on it.

> $2000 barely covers rent ( 1 br LA/SF).

The market will develop housing for basic income people or you could always move to lower cost areas.

> We’d also need rent control legislation to prevent rents from rising to absorb the UBI.

Nope. If people are given basic income, the market will develop housing/services to cater to them.

"The market" has shown itself to be woefully inadequate at developing housing for those on the lower part of the income scale. I'm not sure why that would change under a basic income scenario.

The market hasn't developed housing for people on the current minimum wage, so I have my doubts that it would be any different with UBI

There’s plenty of cheap housing if you don’t need to be near a competitive job market to cover the rent.

Rents will simply rise by whatever the amount of the basic income is.

California is a huge state, you don’t have to live in the heart of LA or San Fran

Also even in my wildest communist fantasies it’s completely infeasible for UBI to cover a 1br market rent in a big city without that immediately causing completely ridiculous inflation. Fiddling with monetary policy doesn’t magically 3x the housing supply.

Wrong comment? The comment is saying move out of big cities. I agree.

You can definitely get a studio in the LA area for like 1400. Close to public transit too.

Because you have to fund basic income.

And if your goal is a population that pays its way and has relatively generous working conditions and less unequal income distributions, the hyper regulated Europe looks a whole lot better than, say, Saudi Arabia where citizens can live comfortable, unproductive lives topped up by monthly payments, discrimination is rife and an underclass of non-citizens do most of the work for very little money, often in truly awful conditions.

Andrew Yang proposed a VAT and redistributing funds from other entitlement programs.

basic income definitely doesn't mean they can deregulate everything else. it greatly lessens the leverage these businesses have over workers but the leverage doesn't go away entirely. also basic income doesn't solve every problem.

Because a UBI is the wrong solution for this problem. Reducing the work week should be done when productivity grows faster than the economy and a UBI does not care whether that is true or not.

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