Macroeconomically, giving the poor money through this kind of redistributio will stimulate the economy and in fact ultimately benefit the rich and large corporations! (As well as small businesses). The reason is obvious, poor people are obliged to spend it all, since they have to stay alive.
And they will spend it, on things they need to survive, like rent and food. Now the landlords, factory farmers, and Walmart have all the wealth. Oh, and massive inflation raises all the prices so your next check doesn’t go as far.
> Oh, and massive inflation raises all the prices so your next check doesn’t go as far.
That is not at all clear.
Food is a competitive market. And even the poor in the US currently get plenty of food. Why would prices increase?
For most standard goods we could ramp up factory capacity and actually expect a decrease in cost/unit. We don't have a supply problem.
Rent is heavily tied to location which is tied to job prospects. There is close to a 10x spread for the same kind of housing dependent on city across the US.
When I was poor I had to go where the jobs were and just suck it up and pay the much higher rental price. This meant room sharing in an expensive city.
With BI I would have had a lot more negotiating power. How do you convince me to pay 5-10x more rent to move to your city?
You inject a double-digit percentage of all cash that exists into the economy year-after-year -- numbers bounded about in this very thread are on the order of 1/3 of all US dollars in existence, just for Americans to receive a minimal, poverty rate handout -- I guarantee you there will be inflation at levels that have never been seen since the founding of this country.
“Democratization of business and industry” is a way of saying less regulation, right? I’m a mostly libertarian myself, and agree, but it’s not a popular opinion among progressives and BI supporters. They focus on “less regulation” meaning less accountability, rather than less barriers to entrepreneurship.
What I mean is mostly the idea of workers running and owning businesses to the largest possible degree and for all major institutions to be nationalized, such as banking, etc.
Indeed even most supposed “libertarians” even in the US want less regulation, meaning more freedom for big business to do what it wants.
Yes, but only because people that are willing to vocally self-identify with a powerless 3rd party platform already extremist in their views.
Us everyday libertarians are often more moderate, realizing that while there is nothing more efficient than a free market, sometimes incentives are not aligned with goals, and markets in those cases efficiently make bad outcomes. In such cases artificial incentives through laws and regulations create the environment in which free markets succeed at getting us what we want. Global warming is a prime example -- I'm a big fan of cap-and-trade systems, a very typical "free market on top of regulation" setup. We just think that by and large most regulations are not of this type and need to go, and in fewer cases we are lacking regulation we might want or need, like carbon trading.
But lack of regulation is NOT "more freedom for big business to do what it wants." In most cases, more regulation is what causes that. Most big businesses welcome regulation because of regulatory capture. They hate getting rid of regulation because it creates environments where they can be out-innovated by competition, old or new:
Actually the free market can often be irrational, inefficient and completely unpredictable. The free market (caring only about profits) is what has given us an environmental catastrophe.
If the regulation gets captured as you say that means less, or no regulation effectively and more freedom for the businesses. Regulation has to have teeth if we’re gonna implement it.
In economics "rational" has a very specific, technical meaning, specifically acting in the way that is most profitable. So I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean when you say that free markets can be irrational by caring only about profits and I would suspect that we are speaking past each other.
Regulation doesn't "get captured." Regulatory capture is where a monopolist captures a market by means of regulation. For example, PayPal invented a new business model: digital money transfers. They then lobbied for and got expansion of financial regulations to make it very, very difficult to enter the money services business. So difficult that for 15 years until now they had no serious competition. Were consumers made safer by that regulation? No, because as it turns out the hurdles to getting approval to operate as a MSB really aren't consumer protecting at all, they're just that: very expensive hurdles, outside the reach of a startup. And the innovation we've seen recently with Venmo, Apple & Samsung Pay, etc. is what we could have had all along if they weren't granted a de facto monopoly that took an Apple-sized company to break.
