I'm sure we have all had terrible bosses. I have probably had one of the worst bosses you could imagine. Quitting that job was one of the best days of my life. However it still isn't a persons birthright or written anywhere in the constitution that you have only have to work for people you like.

If you want to avoid bad bosses you need to learn a skill that makes you highly sought after or be self employed.

It's not about not having to work for an asshole, it's about being protected from abusive business practices. Not everyone can afford lawyers to sue bosses that made them work overtime without overtime pay, for example.

Usually the people who need worker protections the most are the ones being abused the most, for the same reason: they are poor and have no other choice. They have no union and their cases are usually too small-fry to be worth it.

>If you want to avoid bad bosses you need to learn a skill that makes you highly sought after or be self employed.

Ha! Good one. Now let's all gather around a campfire and talk about how our tech giant/startup employer had us working insane hours because "crunch time" or "demonstrate culture fit". You can even add your own! Don't forget to mention prohibitive cost of living in tech hubs and the mountain of student debt you accumulated so you could have a "skill that makes you highly sought after." :)

I've worked in an industry that is notorious for long hours, low pay, high cost of entry, and have even had coworkers get killed on the job. Not 6 hours after my coworker was killed I was asked if I was ok to keep working (my normal 14+ hour shift in shotty dangerous equipment). So I've seen abusive business practices. You know what I did. I went to another place. When that one sucked too, I retooled went into web development. I don't work in an expensive tech town or long hours and I didn't take on student a penny of loan debt.

Not everyone needs a 100k CS degree and to move straight out to San Fran to be useful or productive and there are plenty of things someone can do (plumber, electrician, skilled trades of whatever kind) without shelling out 100k for a degree.

Wouldn't a basic income tend to increase self-employment? It lowers the barrier to striking out on one's own, I would think, at least in fields like ours that don't cost a lot to spin up.

Yeah probably. I think healthcare is a bigger barrier there, but yeah if you had time and a small amount of guaranteed money I'm sure more people would give it a shot.

Also nothing in the Constitution banning a basic income program.

True. The Constitution doesn't explicitly ban a lot of things.

A minimum wage raises the floor for workers making below the minimum. A basic income raises the floor for all. The former results is fewer steps to climb for someone at the bottom to reach your floor, the latter results in an unchanged amount of steps but the stairs just happen to be located further from sea level.

If workers leave walmart to live off of basic income, all walmart has to do is increase prices and workers would again be forced to work for basic sustenance, as they would no longer afford walmart's monopolized goods. If they live in a left-leaning or urban area, they may be lucky to have a food co-op, but those are already unlikely to be paying bare minimum wage, and are generally located in more expensive areas.

At best, UBI will totally ineffective. At worst, few will capitalize on it early on to reach some success before the market adjusts, and the Koch/Cato ilk will use that success to further push an anti-labor agenda until the system implodes again.

I was all for UBI when I first heard of it, but more and more I realize it's just another neoliberal economic policy that fails to address the root causes of class division. Perhaps it will be our decade's "microloan" scam.

> all walmart has to do is increase prices and workers would again be forced to work for basic sustenance

Walmart is not the only retailer in the United States. You're positing widespread collusion on the part of everyone who sells goods and services. That or you're just describing the effects of inflation in a roundabout way.

"fails to address the root causes of class division."

What are the root causes?

I'd imagine that companies would make MORE profit in a world with UBI because more individuals have more disposable income to use on their products.

Would they raise prices? If so, how do we make it work?