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You are misunderstanding me. The government gives you $300 and makes sure that enough healthy food is available for those $300. You don't get $300 worth of foo

• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > And the option to buy cheap food from the government. But then why do you need this at all? There is already food available in the market. If you have $300 you can buy it. There is nothing the government needs to do other than give you the $300. > The government just needs to provide the bare minimum. Broke an arm? Goverment will cast it. There is a pretty good argument that the local government should provide emergency medicine for the same reason they provide fire departments -- you can't choose a provider while you're bleeding out. But most medical care is not provided under emergency conditions. > Want a better education for your kids? Homeschool if you can, or just work for more money and pay for one. But that's the problem. The government takes $10,000 from you and then gives it back if you use their schools. If you want to use your school and it only costs $8000, not only do you not get the $2000 back, you don't get any of it and end up having to pay $18,000 for what should have cost you $8000. So your school doesn't just have to be better than the government's school, it has to be so much better that it's worth paying twice. There is no legitimate reason to impose that requirement instead of allowing people who don't use the government's school to get back the money they saved the taxpayer.
  • d0100 6y ago
    > There is already food available in the market. Leave it to capitalism to inflate UBI out of usefulness. Let the market compete with the baseline, never replace it. > you don't get any of it and end up having to pay $18,000 Well, supply and demand should work here, right? Isn't the market the mythical machine of just prices? If the market won't pay taxes + $8,000 for private school, there will be no schools for that price. If it does, it is worth it and you'll pay. I'm very confident that all this quarantine will do is show the world that disrupting the market won't break the world. The world will just adapt. It should be the same with UBI. UBI could just be a government guarantee that a citizen will never become homeless/neglected because of lack of work(by any cause, be it skill, opportunity or mental health). It's the new baseline. "Losing everything" now would mean just going back to surfing the web and eating government cheese in some cramped apartment. Not homelessness, starvation, abuse and neglect.
    • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > Leave it to capitalism to inflate UBI out of usefulness. Let the market compete with the baseline, never replace it. Okay sure, but that's probably what would happen. So what do you do when the government tries to sell food and not enough people buy theirs for them to stay in the black? They'd have to raise prices to cover fixed costs and then have even fewer customers. Presumably once the price was so high they had literally zero customers then you could shut it down? > Well, supply and demand should work here, right? Isn't the market the mythical machine of just prices? If the market won't pay taxes + $8,000 for private school, there will be no schools for that price. If it does, it is worth it and you'll pay. The problem isn't that private schools aren't worth $8000, it's that they aren't worth $8000 more than public schools. Which leads people to send their kids to public school and waste money (public schools cost $10,000 instead of $8000) in order to get something worse (people don't value private schools at $8000 more than public schools but do value them at $2000 more). > "Losing everything" now would mean just going back to surfing the web and eating government cheese in some cramped apartment. Not homelessness, starvation, abuse and neglect. The UBI does that without the government providing anything but the money. If you have money you can buy food, housing and internet in the market from anyone you like.
      • d0100 6y ago
        > They'd have to raise prices to cover fixed costs and then have even fewer customers. That's the part where government officials do their job and figure the best way to solve this. Subsidize regional staple foods, community farms, fix prices for some type of foods... The government doesn't actually have to have the food in warehouses, it only has to guarantee that you'll be able to buy healthy X/calories a day with those $300. Maybe put out a weekly menu, with sources of cheap food? For UBI to work as intended the government has to act as a guarantor that you'll be able to buy everything that UBI was meant to buy. Or else big daddy capital man will just find a way to consume those pennies and UBI becomes UB-bye. No matter the amount of taxes, profit will still exist. The rich will still be rich. The rich can still do what they do. The difference is that they can't take from the poor. They have to do what capitalism really is about: provide value so that the market will pay you.
• labster 6y ago
  The government has an interest in long-term worker productivity, to increase its tax base. So what possible economic incentive would a government have not to return an injured worker to full productivity? Not taking investments like these is actuarially throwing money away. Capitalism is just worse at providing universal services. Private mail can’t compete. Water is provided by private industry at rates thousands of times more. Could you imagine the harm caused by fire fighting becoming a protection racket? Infectious disease is like fire: not a moral choice, it just spreads from person to person. I would be happy with my taxes doubling in exchange for getting sick less often, because I could surely make it up at work.