And people can't survive on slave wages. The people running the country (USA) are out of touch with the current reality many people live in. This isn't the ,1950s where a part time job can sustain anyone.
If someone wants to work a minimum wage job in America, they should not expect to be able to acquire luxury goods or anything of great value other than being able to subsist. It's nothing against them, it's just that the value being provided by the worker is not generally that valuable. This is in itself a UBI of sorts. Nobody inherently has the right to simply take from another (food, shelter, healthcare) simply for being alive and providing nothing in return. But showing up to a job and clocking in and clocking out every day, and doing one's job will bring in some return and you can then go out and exchange that for survival needs.
Now if you want to live a little better you're going to want to provide more value than is expected and you will get more return on that. A simple example is waiting tips. I have definitely tipped bigger for service people who put in extra value. And above all else, morale and general happiness of a culture goes up when people are producing and exchanging HIGH VALUE.
This is not the economy taught in schools. "Economics" as a subject has been mired down so thoroughly in complexity, trapdoors and dead ends nobody can agree on anything, and socialism and communism emerge as great concepts. It's just that "nobody has quite implemented socialism [which is communism] correctly" and thus resulted in untold suffering, misery and death throughout the ages. If communism is so great then why do so many people flee socialist and communist countries and try to make it to the USA? Because we have a FREE MARKET. Not total government appropriations and grants, yet.
I feel like the opposite of what you say is true: as economies grow past a certain point, market regulation is essential to avoid monopolistic practices and winner-take-all situations.
If the US was a true free market, our income inequality problems would be even worse, and we'd live in a de-facto corporatocracy. No thank you.
Look, I don't have all the answers but I do know that without the exchange of value for value as the basic unit of economic strength there will be confusion, waste and contraction in a society.