You are right to say that money alone is not enough to eliminate poverty, although that’s no sufficient argument to disprove the effectiveness of UBI, because you only distinguish between poverty and no-poverty, but not between more-poverty and less-poverty. I don’t know if UBI can reduce poverty, but if you want to disprove it then you need to say more.
It’s amazing that you addressed various aspects of poverty and not reduced it to more shirts vs fewer shirts, but you somehow mingled everything up so that it’s difficult to see your point. In the story about the lacking oxygen, it’s an example of absolute poverty. As you wrote later, oxygen can be produced, actually market economy always works to produce the most needed goods. I guess for someone to survive, a finite number of goods would survive, then market economy would only fail to fix absolute poverty ultimately if itself produces new scarcity, like of oxygen. Yes, it’s known that production can cause environmental problems and pollute air, due to the phenomenon called externality. Government is actually one possible actor who could intervene and fix this market failure, but then you said governments ALWAYS destroy wealth without specifying what you mean. Is the action of getting more fresh air the destroying of wealth because the action costs while air doesn’t? Or for some reason the government insists to do it in a stupid and costly way and forbids you to do it in a more clever way?
You also wrote something about the necessity of sending kids to a better school district so that they won’t be bullied. That’s an example of relative poverty, and as your friends said, relative poverty will always exist, UBI won’t help, nor would market economy. It doesn’t mean that bullying relatively poor kids should be tolerated or even praised, but that’s not the topic here either, I guess.
You are right to say that money alone is not enough to eliminate poverty, although that’s no sufficient argument to disprove the effectiveness of UBI, because you only distinguish between poverty and no-poverty, but not between more-poverty and less-poverty. I don’t know if UBI can reduce poverty, but if you want to disprove it then you need to say more.
It’s amazing that you addressed various aspects of poverty and not reduced it to more shirts vs fewer shirts, but you somehow mingled everything up so that it’s difficult to see your point. In the story about the lacking oxygen, it’s an example of absolute poverty. As you wrote later, oxygen can be produced, actually market economy always works to produce the most needed goods. I guess for someone to survive, a finite number of goods would survive, then market economy would only fail to fix absolute poverty ultimately if itself produces new scarcity, like of oxygen. Yes, it’s known that production can cause environmental problems and pollute air, due to the phenomenon called externality. Government is actually one possible actor who could intervene and fix this market failure, but then you said governments ALWAYS destroy wealth without specifying what you mean. Is the action of getting more fresh air the destroying of wealth because the action costs while air doesn’t? Or for some reason the government insists to do it in a stupid and costly way and forbids you to do it in a more clever way?
You also wrote something about the necessity of sending kids to a better school district so that they won’t be bullied. That’s an example of relative poverty, and as your friends said, relative poverty will always exist, UBI won’t help, nor would market economy. It doesn’t mean that bullying relatively poor kids should be tolerated or even praised, but that’s not the topic here either, I guess.