First time I’ve had the opportunity to comment “just tax land lol”—if we’re thinking about how to craft an ideal policy situation (which we are doing, by talking about UBI), it shouldn’t be too much to posit that UBI would pair best with:
Georgism, so that the rent on land is not monopolized by landowning elites, but rather flows mainly to the public purse (perhaps this land rent is the main thing that helps fund the UBI)! More detail on georgism and how this would work can be found at this series of long but engaging blog posts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
Unfortunately Georgism would not be a complete solution, because of course land is not the ONLY thing that parasitic elites could seek to monopolize and rent-seek with. So you’d need an enthusiastic, competent state that could play a bit of consumer-protection whack-a-mole, trying to spot new rent-seeking monopolies and break them up. Eg, enact YIMBY policies to prevent a monopoly on housing, stimulate competition and free trade in general to prevent monopolies in goods and services, etc. It would be a dynamic situation, and there would always be a little bit of elite parasitism going on, but the more competent and human-thriving-aligned your government is, the better they’d be able to play whack-a-mole.
That said, on a larger, more philosophical level, if the economic fundamentals of society are naturally super unequal (huge number of powerless people hoping that elites take pity on them and implement an ideal UBI+georgism+etc policy regime, while a tiny portion of the population produces like 99% of all economic value), that is inherently gonna be a more precarious situation than one in which the economic fundamentals are naturally pretty egalitarian (maybe imagine a world where manual labor is in high demand, and pretty much anyone can do manual labor, so wages are naturally high across the society). The unequal society will have to rely on the stability of political institutions and human willingness to do the right thing; the naturally-equal society gets it for free.
Unfortunately, we don’t really get much control over the economic fundamentals of our civilization (which depends on stuff like technology, supply and demand driven by random exogenous factors, etc), so I think crafting an ideal policy situation is the best we can aspire to.
First time I’ve had the opportunity to comment “just tax land lol”—if we’re thinking about how to craft an ideal policy situation (which we are doing, by talking about UBI), it shouldn’t be too much to posit that UBI would pair best with:
Georgism, so that the rent on land is not monopolized by landowning elites, but rather flows mainly to the public purse (perhaps this land rent is the main thing that helps fund the UBI)! More detail on georgism and how this would work can be found at this series of long but engaging blog posts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
Unfortunately Georgism would not be a complete solution, because of course land is not the ONLY thing that parasitic elites could seek to monopolize and rent-seek with. So you’d need an enthusiastic, competent state that could play a bit of consumer-protection whack-a-mole, trying to spot new rent-seeking monopolies and break them up. Eg, enact YIMBY policies to prevent a monopoly on housing, stimulate competition and free trade in general to prevent monopolies in goods and services, etc. It would be a dynamic situation, and there would always be a little bit of elite parasitism going on, but the more competent and human-thriving-aligned your government is, the better they’d be able to play whack-a-mole.
That said, on a larger, more philosophical level, if the economic fundamentals of society are naturally super unequal (huge number of powerless people hoping that elites take pity on them and implement an ideal UBI+georgism+etc policy regime, while a tiny portion of the population produces like 99% of all economic value), that is inherently gonna be a more precarious situation than one in which the economic fundamentals are naturally pretty egalitarian (maybe imagine a world where manual labor is in high demand, and pretty much anyone can do manual labor, so wages are naturally high across the society). The unequal society will have to rely on the stability of political institutions and human willingness to do the right thing; the naturally-equal society gets it for free.
Unfortunately, we don’t really get much control over the economic fundamentals of our civilization (which depends on stuff like technology, supply and demand driven by random exogenous factors, etc), so I think crafting an ideal policy situation is the best we can aspire to.