Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

The elephants in the room are the extremely cheap labor that already undermines the legit goods and services:

  - extremely cheap prison labor
  - undocumented laborers who have (almost) no legal rights and who take difficult jobs
  - ex-cons who have to pay a portion of their wages to employers who are willing to hire them
  - jobs where wages must be subsidized by government programs (eg. WalMart encourages their lowest paid workers to sign up for SNAP)

UBI is nice, but the markets are already distorted and without addressing these issues, UBI just distorts the markets more.

That said, even if we can't address these issues, I'm happy to support modernizing the American (federal, state, and county) welfare programs -- including giving recipients the option of taking the cash value.

The market is also distorted by us humans' inelastic demand for food and housing, which means sometimes sellers can charge higher prices for things such as these that people cannot go without if they don't like the price.

I'm not sure if UBI would help reduce that distortion or not, but ideally it would be nice to have a consequence be that participation in markets and in transactions (such as housing) is more voluntary.

(Edit: a word)

Yes the "U" is crucial. We must raise the price of labor, and the only way to do that without creating a market is to sidestep "labor" altogether and set a consumption floor for everyone.

Thank you for pointing out that elephant, but that's just the sort of thing UBI in fact aims to address.

This is a good point. I actually consider shoring up these loopholes as part of (or needing to be passed alongside) UBI.

Yeah, I would prefer we fix them then deal with either UBI or fixing welfare programs, but with the current state of Congress, I have little hope that this is a probability.

> - jobs where wages must be subsidized by government programs (eg. WalMart encourages their lowest paid workers to sign up for SNAP)

UBI would obviate the need for SNAP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com