UBI is implemented tomorrow. Every citizen gets $1000 per month.

Landlord now knows you have an extra $1000 that you never had before. Why wouldn’t the landlord raise prices?

Now you have an extra $1000 a month and instead of eating rice and beans for a few meals you go out to a restaurant. The restaurant owners know everyone is eating out more so why not raise prices and maximize shareholder profit as always. The restaurant/corporation is on TV saying, “well, demand increased and it is a simple Economic principle that prices had to increase. There’s nothing we can do about it”.

Your state/country has toll roads. The state needs money for its deficit. UBI is implemented and the state/country sees it as the perfect time to incrementally raise toll prices.

Next thing you know UBI is effectively gone because everything costs more and billionaires keep hitting higher and higher all time net worth records.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    I find it is a systems-question, not a political-question,

    and I think the correct answer is to have a publically-owned portion of any market, be public/not-for-profit, as a means of enforcing honesty/integrity into that market.

    IOW, you don’t nationalize every damn thing, because institutional-mentality is every bit as evil as corporatism-psychopathy-machiavellianism, only different in style…

    ( anyone who isn’t understanding that … hasn’t tried living & working among it, either in Washington DC or in Canada’s Ottawa, or in whatever England’s equiv, the EU’s equiv, etc. )

    you instead make certain that a portion of the oil industry is national, a portion of the (whatever) industry is national, etc, and if there is huge discrepancy between the nationalized-portion & the private-portion, then you go in with criminal-investigators, after the C-suites of the corporations used to gaming the country’s economy.

    Putting 3 barracuda in the fish-farm-pen, in order to make all the survivors in the pen be fit is a related concept: same principle, different domain.

    You put some not-for-profit operation into the functionally-cartel-domains, & you use those “barracuda” to force integrity into those specific domains.

    Do it strategically, not just reactively ( comms, transport, energy, food, journalism, etc )