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I feel like rent itself is a major problem in current society. It takes 30years for a person to pay off their little chunk of land and house. Some cannot even have that. Land is a natural resource, and as with air and water, it should be distributed. It is a good time for a modern homesteading act. Maybe a citizens dividend.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen's_dividend

Why does it matter if the income comes from a basic income source or not? Rents rise only if there is more demand than supply. And it seems silly to say that we are not capable of supplying enough housing for our current population.

In nations were economic equality is higher, and where government's provide a strong safety net, there is no indication of rents spiralling out of control.

Safety net is not UBI. Safety net expects a working class and a market economy. UBI expects non-workers wholly dependant on the government with set, public incomes.

Supply doesn't matter. The land owning class, me, gives no shit about supply. We'll all just raise rates to match what the government gives. Why wouldn't we? This is exactly what happens with any government entitlement. Medicare covers mobility scooters up to $5000. Guess what? My $2500 scooter now costs $5000. My competitors will do the same. Then in a day that becomes the new norm.

That's only one problem with UBI. The others are worse like in a generation you have people who have no useful skills, so once those robots running everything aren't competitive with robots from market economies that don't do UBI and expect people to work and be competitive and find innovations, then our goods are too expensive and our economy collapses because we all decided to model ourselves after a retirement arts community. Not to mention that history has shown that if you give people enough cash to just get by, they tend to lean towards a leisure lifestyle of drug abuse, gambling, non-education, non-productivity, etc. Why not? If no worries, then you might as well party. People in the ghetto aren't any different than you and me. They just realized that a lifetime of welfare means a lifetime of leisure, so they adapt to a leisure lifestyle and deal with all the problems that brings.

Lastly, robots aren't magically going to remain competitive by themselves. Industries won't magically take care of themselves. Even with heavy automation you still need people coming in day in and day out to make sure we don't fall behind the curve. If a Chinese robot can make 100 dresses in 5 minutes and ours can only make 50, then suddenly we're in a lot of trouble as our per item cost has literally doubled. If anything, the tech arms race is heavily accelerated because the stakes are so much higher. We'd probably have record levels of employment and education to just keep up.

Medicare only allowing specific payments for scooters under specific rules is causing more of a market distortion than more a UBI approach of just giving cash to the recipients and letting regular market forces vs customer choice regulate the market to some level of efficiency. If landlords want to raise rents too high, other developers will address the market (just like the regular housing market now... as long as there aren't other rules warping the market). If anything it point to society needing to tax landlords higher so that rentier behavior is discouraged...

Your picture of UBI paints it as if people wouldn't want to earn more than a minimal UBI. I think that's blatantly wrong - people are greedy, they want more. The people who what more than UBI will find useful skills (and civilization won't collapse).

>Not to mention that history has shown that if you give people enough cash to just get by, they tend to lean towards a leisure lifestyle of drug abuse, gambling, non-education, non-productivity, etc. Why not? If no worries, then you might as well party.

Any sources to back up this statement?

"But it turns out that the effects of a UBI on labor participation weren’t nearly as bad as some had feared. Researchers[1] found that households as a whole reduced their workloads by about 13%, as economist Evelyn Forget explains in a 2011 paper published by Canadian Public Policy. But within each household, the (generally male) primary breadwinners cut back on work hours only slightly. Women who were secondary earners reduced their work hours more, devoting more time to household care and staying home with young children. Teenagers also put off getting part-time jobs to focus on school, leading to a noticeable decline in high school dropout rates in Dauphin, and to double-digit increases in high school completion among participating families in New Jersey, Seattle, and Denver."

[1] https://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf

Article quote is pulled from: https://qz.com/765902/ubi-wouldnt-mean-everyone-quits-workin...

>to focus on school

Yes obviously because school is an investment: school>college>decent job.

What happens when decent job doesn't exist? Its unrealistic to pull data from an economy based on job seeking and say it applies to an economy where jobs are rare/non-existent. You can't eliminate the main incentive for education and then pretend things are going to be the same.

I picked the ghetto as an example because decent jobs aren't available, good schools are impossible to get into due to substandard schooling in those communities, and then when you try and beat the odds you have to contend with things like racial or cultural discrimination from employers. There's a reason so many people in those communities believe in hopelessness, because ultimately a lot of it is hopeless. So if 'decent job' doesn't exit, why would UBI kids bother with school? I suspect they'll just settle for a leisure lifestyle. Remove the goals, then you'll remove the effort to get there.

> I suspect they'll just settle for a leisure lifestyle.

This is basically the crux of the two sides of the UBI issue.

People against UBI believe others are no good and will waste their life if given the chance.

People for UBI believe others will use it as an opportunity to lift themselves up.

Why does the only worthwhile goal in your argument seem to be "get a good job"? People can find fulfillment with many other goals that don't need to be jobs.

As someone else who is a landlord, I would undercut you by a small margin to ensure I'm taking in rental income. Depending on supply (which you care naught about) you may find yourself sitting on empty units priced at 1/3 UBI wondering where all the tenants are.

Medical products can raise their prices because they have almost no competition, not only because there are very few accredited suppliers (much easier to collude), but also because you can't use that money for anything else, hence the consumer has no incentive to find a cheaper option.

Right now, rents are high, because people need to live in very specific places to get jobs. When you can live anywhere in the US and still get an income, you're literally talking about a market with hundreds of thousands of suppliers, offering way more land than what's actually required to live.

Competition plays a role here. On the margin, basic income would make it easier for people to move to relatively cheaper places (much as Social Security does).

I agree that it's unlikely that it would be so generous that most people would stop working. People generally want more than the bare minimum. But not being completely dependent on your job provides some flexibility and bargaining power.

> I have yet to see UBI advocates resolve the inflationary problem short of re-implementing Soviet-style communism, yet they are unable to resolve the various problems with communism the same way the Soviets and others were unable to do so in the past.

Soviet-style communism is not the only type of "communism" that is possible, just like American-style capitalism isn't the only way to do capitalism. In fact, some argue that Soviet-style communism was never communism in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

That said, what various problems with communism do you think are not resolved?

Where supply is constrained I can't see any other outcome.

More social housing would probably have a better result.