4 ms·

So I get where you're going with this, but the businesses are still competing with one another in a free market. So yes, you're right that if all the avocado f

So I get where you're going with this, but the businesses are still competing with one another in a free market. So yes, you're right that if all the avocado farmers in California decided to engage in price fixing because they know that more money exists and that they can get it, they probably can. But it presupposes highly monopolistic behavior that doesn't seem very likely to work for most markets. Especially if it's easy to become an entrepreneur. The business, after all, makes a profit as long as their price is above their cost. So unless their costs go up, competition keeps prices down. Now, I think you're half right -- prices will go up, but it's not because of gouging by middlemen or traditional inflation. It will be because as people drop out of the labor market, the really undesirable jobs will become more costly to fill. But that strikes me as a much more fair free market than what we have now. Yes, you will have to pay more to have your garbage picked up in front of your house. Why? Because as it turns out, you would much rather be doing whatever you do than deal with a thousand people's garbage. Maybe they should be getting paid more than you, in a voluntary free market. So I imagine it will be sort-of inflation, but almost better described as a rebalancing of the economy. Jobs that humans can do much more easily than robots will get higher salaries. Jobs that are enjoyable get lower salaries. Overall, salary spread across jobs becomes much smaller. But I don't think it's necessarily likely to be some kind of overall inflation, it's a redistribution of wealth accomplished by simultaneous direct transfer of wealth through the UBI, in addition to a redistribution of power accomplished by allowing "Nothing" to be an option that employers have to compete against.

prostoalex 10y ago
> But it presupposes highly monopolistic behavior that doesn't seem very likely to work for most markets. Higher education costs expanded to absorb the extra money from the student loans thrown at them, healthcare costs increased as more consumers started competing for a fixed supply of appointment slots, hospital beds and medical services.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > Higher education costs expanded to absorb the extra money from the student loans thrown at them That's because they're catastrophically stupid industry-specific interest rate subsidies. A dollar for tuition is then less expensive than a dollar for anything else, so everyone conspires to buy things with the cheap government money that isn't available when used for anything else. And that process is highly inefficient because it's basically a huge implicit fraud scheme to redirect subsidized student loan money to things that aren't strictly education, which no one can admit to out loud or explicitly negotiate for because it's illegal to use the money for that. Then it's, look how expensive "education" has become! A UBI doesn't do that because it doesn't restrict what you can use the money for. > healthcare costs increased as more consumers started competing for a fixed supply of appointment slots, hospital beds and medical services. In part this is the same thing (here is a huge pile of money that you can only use for healthcare, now everyone go swamp the doctor's office at the same time). And the rest of it is temporary because no one knew the law was coming ahead of time so now we need some time to increase the supply of healthcare providers.
  - prostoalex 10y ago
    > because it's basically a huge implicit fraud scheme to redirect subsidized student loan money to things that aren't strictly education, which no one can admit to out loud or explicitly negotiate for I agree, but how does showing up with a wad of cash instead of a check from a student loan agency increase your negotiating power? Large number of international students today (Chinese and Saudi until recently) paid cash and yet had little say on football teams, new administrative buildings or spending in general. The university system just goes out and borrows whatever it feels like, the debt service is added to expenses. UBI also removes the advantage of centralized negotiating power that's beneficial in industries like healthcare. With Medicare or a private insurance company the $500 list price for doctor's exam can be negotiated down to $99. With UBI it's the consumer against doctor's office, whch historically did not play out well due to massive information disadvantage.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > I agree, but how does showing up with a wad of cash instead of a check from a student loan agency increase your negotiating power? Because cash you can spend somewhere else. Suppose you like football. If the money is "student loans" then you can spend it by attending a school with a big fancy college football stadium and subsidized tickets for students. If the the money is cash then you can use it to go to that school instead of a less expensive one with no football stadium, or you can go to the less expensive school and use the money to buy NFL season tickets. So when the money is student loans, people have only the first option and all the schools have to build big fancy football stadiums to attract students. But you can't do that on a per-student basis. And you can't directly buy college football tickets with student loan money but you can launder it through administration to subsidize them. So everybody who attends that school ends up paying for football even if all they really wanted was an education, and then people have to consider the quality of the school's football team when choosing schools instead of only the quality of their professors. It would have been better to have just let the students who like football use the money to buy NFL tickets. And so on for twelve other categories of student loan money laundering colleges have to engage in to attract students. > UBI also removes the advantage of centralized negotiating power that's beneficial in industries like healthcare. With Medicare or a private insurance company the $500 list price for doctor's exam can be negotiated down to $99. There is no reason you can't use your UBI money to buy private insurance. And the only reason the list price for those things is $500 is that everybody knows the scam. The buyer for the insurance company wants to look like a great negotiator to his boss, so the doctor's office claims everything costs five times as much as they actually want and the buyer gets to look like a big hero for whacking it down so much. And in general insurance makes things cost more for the same reason colleges with fancy football stadiums are more expensive. People don't ask whether something is worth the cost when they're spending somebody else's money. If you're paying out of your own pocket, you ask if knowing the result of some test is really worth $1200 of your money. If the insurance company is paying for it, you run all the tests whether you need them or not.

prostoalex 10y ago

> But it presupposes highly monopolistic behavior that doesn't seem very likely to work for most markets. Higher education costs expanded to absorb the extra money from the student loans thrown at them, healthcare costs increased as more consumers started competing for a fixed supply of appointment slots, hospital beds and medical services.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> Higher education costs expanded to absorb the extra money from the student loans thrown at them That's because they're catastrophically stupid industry-specific interest rate subsidies. A dollar for tuition is then less expensive than a dollar for anything else, so everyone conspires to buy things with the cheap government money that isn't available when used for anything else. And that process is highly inefficient because it's basically a huge implicit fraud scheme to redirect subsidized student loan money to things that aren't strictly education, which no one can admit to out loud or explicitly negotiate for because it's illegal to use the money for that. Then it's, look how expensive "education" has become! A UBI doesn't do that because it doesn't restrict what you can use the money for. > healthcare costs increased as more consumers started competing for a fixed supply of appointment slots, hospital beds and medical services. In part this is the same thing (here is a huge pile of money that you can only use for healthcare, now everyone go swamp the doctor's office at the same time). And the rest of it is temporary because no one knew the law was coming ahead of time so now we need some time to increase the supply of healthcare providers.
- prostoalex 10y ago
  > because it's basically a huge implicit fraud scheme to redirect subsidized student loan money to things that aren't strictly education, which no one can admit to out loud or explicitly negotiate for I agree, but how does showing up with a wad of cash instead of a check from a student loan agency increase your negotiating power? Large number of international students today (Chinese and Saudi until recently) paid cash and yet had little say on football teams, new administrative buildings or spending in general. The university system just goes out and borrows whatever it feels like, the debt service is added to expenses. UBI also removes the advantage of centralized negotiating power that's beneficial in industries like healthcare. With Medicare or a private insurance company the $500 list price for doctor's exam can be negotiated down to $99. With UBI it's the consumer against doctor's office, whch historically did not play out well due to massive information disadvantage.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > I agree, but how does showing up with a wad of cash instead of a check from a student loan agency increase your negotiating power? Because cash you can spend somewhere else. Suppose you like football. If the money is "student loans" then you can spend it by attending a school with a big fancy college football stadium and subsidized tickets for students. If the the money is cash then you can use it to go to that school instead of a less expensive one with no football stadium, or you can go to the less expensive school and use the money to buy NFL season tickets. So when the money is student loans, people have only the first option and all the schools have to build big fancy football stadiums to attract students. But you can't do that on a per-student basis. And you can't directly buy college football tickets with student loan money but you can launder it through administration to subsidize them. So everybody who attends that school ends up paying for football even if all they really wanted was an education, and then people have to consider the quality of the school's football team when choosing schools instead of only the quality of their professors. It would have been better to have just let the students who like football use the money to buy NFL tickets. And so on for twelve other categories of student loan money laundering colleges have to engage in to attract students. > UBI also removes the advantage of centralized negotiating power that's beneficial in industries like healthcare. With Medicare or a private insurance company the $500 list price for doctor's exam can be negotiated down to $99. There is no reason you can't use your UBI money to buy private insurance. And the only reason the list price for those things is $500 is that everybody knows the scam. The buyer for the insurance company wants to look like a great negotiator to his boss, so the doctor's office claims everything costs five times as much as they actually want and the buyer gets to look like a big hero for whacking it down so much. And in general insurance makes things cost more for the same reason colleges with fancy football stadiums are more expensive. People don't ask whether something is worth the cost when they're spending somebody else's money. If you're paying out of your own pocket, you ask if knowing the result of some test is really worth $1200 of your money. If the insurance company is paying for it, you run all the tests whether you need them or not.