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Give poor people money they will spend it and the market will figure out what they want and need faster then any rich person. We should live in a world where we

Give poor people money they will spend it and the market will figure out what they want and need faster then any rich person. We should live in a world where we rely on rich people donating to charities nor go fund mea for insulin (that fail and people die)

pdonis 5y ago
> Give poor people money they will spend it and the market will figure out what they want and need faster then any rich person. If the market will figure that out so fast, then the way for poor people to become not poor is to become part of the market. Produce things that other people want, and sell them. Giving people money as a one-time gift to help them bootstrap their way to doing that is a great idea. Rich people do that all the time; they're called "angel investors". The government can't do that; certainly that's not what UBI is. The key point you are missing is that if you just give people money, and they spend it, and don't produce anything, you haven't helped the situation at all. You've made it worse. It's not enough for the market to figure out what people want; someone has to produce those things. Money flowing back and forth between people depends on everyone producing something. If money starts flowing to people who aren't producing anything, the incentive to produce goes away, and the market will stop being able to provide the things people want, because nobody has any incentive to produce them. In fact, the arguments being made in this discussion about rich people being inefficient at spending money are based on precisely this observation: the rich people aren't producing anything to match up with all the money they have. And the argument for redistributing that money to others who will make better use of it is that those others will produce more with it than the rich people do. The fact that the others will also consume more is just looking at it from the other side. Nothing can be consumed until it is produced. So you can't just give people money for them to consume it; that's just as bad as the rich people having it. You have to figure out how to use that money to produce more. And that's something governments simply suck at doing.

pdonis 5y ago

> Give poor people money they will spend it and the market will figure out what they want and need faster then any rich person. If the market will figure that out so fast, then the way for poor people to become not poor is to become part of the market. Produce things that other people want, and sell them. Giving people money as a one-time gift to help them bootstrap their way to doing that is a great idea. Rich people do that all the time; they're called "angel investors". The government can't do that; certainly that's not what UBI is. The key point you are missing is that if you just give people money, and they spend it, and don't produce anything, you haven't helped the situation at all. You've made it worse. It's not enough for the market to figure out what people want; someone has to produce those things. Money flowing back and forth between people depends on everyone producing something. If money starts flowing to people who aren't producing anything, the incentive to produce goes away, and the market will stop being able to provide the things people want, because nobody has any incentive to produce them. In fact, the arguments being made in this discussion about rich people being inefficient at spending money are based on precisely this observation: the rich people aren't producing anything to match up with all the money they have. And the argument for redistributing that money to others who will make better use of it is that those others will produce more with it than the rich people do. The fact that the others will also consume more is just looking at it from the other side. Nothing can be consumed until it is produced. So you can't just give people money for them to consume it; that's just as bad as the rich people having it. You have to figure out how to use that money to produce more. And that's something governments simply suck at doing.