UBI is not a good idea and it's very simple as to why it's not.

If everyone gets say, $12k a year from the Government, $1k a month, the verb first thing that's going to happen is your landlord is gonna hike your rent, possibly by $1000 a month.

UBI seeks to use market solutions to solve problems the market cannot solve. Jobs being increasingly outsourced to automation is an inevitable part of human advancement. It's also an inevitable part of capitalism as capitalists always want to decrease their labour costs

UBI seeks to maintain those market solutions to these problems without actually solving the root cause of the problems - being that when people lose their jobs, they lose the ability to provide basic necessities for themselves.

UBI simply enables people to return to the market to seek those solutions, the same market that creates the problem of not providing for everyone in the first place.

Universal Basic Services (UBS) would be much much better.

Rather than UBI, which would effectively just become a taxpayer funded landlord subsidy, UBS would cut out the middle man of the market and just provide the service directly to people for free which would likely mean wiser use of money too (e.g. no advertising, marketing etc)

Why give people money to buy food at Walmart when you could have nationalized supermarkets where food is free where there is a sort of quasi market with non health foods in that the stuff that's being left on the shelves doesn't get produced anymore?

Why give ppl money to pay rent to their landlord when you could just *give* them housing?

Why give ppl money to pay their healthcare insurance provider when you could just *give* them healthcare?

When billionaires like Elon Musk are backing UBI, you know it's not good for you

I know rent controls exist but rent controls will only last long term in two conditions:

1) Area of high property value
2) Area of high labour demand

These two things need to overlap for politicians to choose to maintain rent controls over listening to landlord lobbyists

This is why rent controls are maintained in New York City. It's an area of both high labour demand and high property values meaning one has to be curtailed for the other to be feasible. If labour can't afford to live close to work it's going to curtail economic growth

That's why politicians in places like NYC will choose to maintain rent controls because the economic impact of not doing it is larger let alone the political impact of scrapping it

In places of not high property values but high labour demand or vice versa, those rents will rise

Part of me is quite amused at the people who've only after seeing this thread gone "WOAH is this dude some kind of Communist or something?"

UBI could *maybe* work with something like the nationalization of land and price fixing on the value of land AND rent controls because if UBI did act as some kind of economic stimulus then that means the land goes up in value whilst the landlord can't raise rent...

So they'll end up just selling the property and evicting the tenant when it gets to the point that the value of that land with increased economic activity as a result of UBI (which I don't fully buy as a guaranteed outcome) goes up causes them to lose money

There's a LOT of caveats for UBI to work as I'm sure many of its proponents will fully admit, but I don't understand why leftists would pursue market based solutions to provide for the basic necessities when providing them directly is a much more straightforward idea

Is UBI the worst idea in the world? No of course not.

But for people who are advocating it, for the goals they're trying to achieve even if you didn't want to go my route of central planning then reverting back to some kind of Keynesianism makes more sense?

UBI seems like a plaster specifically for neoliberalism and globalism, whereas Keynesianism has incredible flaws but it was better than what we've got and seemed to do more to solve this issue than UBI would.

80% top tax rates, heavy union membership, heavy govt spending

I SHOULD ALSO CLARIFY

I understand this isn't increasing the supply of the money so it's not inflation in the traditional sense. It's a handful of capitalist in the most powerful enterprises, especially primary producers, looking to raise their bottom line.