>UBI may reasonably give people at the bottom of the market sufficient money to become participants.
The incentive is still going to drive a businessperson to come up with a way to take that money from those people (as it is now). So the rent seeking could expand to include something like slum-lording trailer parks in areas which are even further from possible employment, potentially locking those residents into a radius where no one around does anything but pot and video games.
Meanwhile, since there is more money available to the middle classes, can’t I just sell/rent them a house with more bells and whistles? Maybe they’re discerning customers with an extra thousand dollars, so we build the house on 16“ centers again instead of 20” and sell them their new, wonderful, higher-quality lifestyle. Or maybe we just put a thousand dollar countertop on the same crummy house.
Or is something more fundamentally changed by UBI in the basic system underlying rent-seeking and inflation (in essence, the dynamics of capitalism)? To me, rent-seeking is only a specific incarnation of that greater dynamic of exploiting whatever source of income you can by whatever advantage you have within the system to take money from whoever can and will give it to you, and not as distinct as people make it out to be. The only thing UBI fundamentally changes in this equation is who can render funds, and how much they can render.
>UBI may reasonably give people at the bottom of the market sufficient money to become participants.
The incentive is still going to drive a businessperson to come up with a way to take that money from those people (as it is now). So the rent seeking could expand to include something like slum-lording trailer parks in areas which are even further from possible employment, potentially locking those residents into a radius where no one around does anything but pot and video games.
Meanwhile, since there is more money available to the middle classes, can’t I just sell/rent them a house with more bells and whistles? Maybe they’re discerning customers with an extra thousand dollars, so we build the house on 16“ centers again instead of 20” and sell them their new, wonderful, higher-quality lifestyle. Or maybe we just put a thousand dollar countertop on the same crummy house.
Or is something more fundamentally changed by UBI in the basic system underlying rent-seeking and inflation (in essence, the dynamics of capitalism)? To me, rent-seeking is only a specific incarnation of that greater dynamic of exploiting whatever source of income you can by whatever advantage you have within the system to take money from whoever can and will give it to you, and not as distinct as people make it out to be. The only thing UBI fundamentally changes in this equation is who can render funds, and how much they can render.