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Re:Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supp... by SilasX on Monday November 13, 2017 @02:09PM (#15689175)
Right, that's IMHO the biggest problem with BI schemes, and it gets little attention: we don't have a good grasp on the dynamics behind why (certain) prices go up to gobble up every gain in income or government grant.

It's illustrated well in Churchill's story about the do-gooders who bought out a bridge and lifted the toll, only to find that rents went up by the exact cost of regularly crossing the bridge.

http://www.landvaluetax.org/current-affairs-comment/winston-...

(Search for "bridge".)

If rents just advance to capture the BI, all you've done is give a big subsidy to landowners.

Re:Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supp... by dragonwriter on Monday November 13, 2017 @04:47PM (#15690566)
> we don't have a good grasp on the dynamics behind why (certain) prices go up to gobble up every gain in income or government grant.

We actually do, both when it is driven by rational (e.g., shifting money into a monopolized market) and irrational (encouraging time-deferred costs that people are known empirically to discount) forces.

> If rents just advance to capture the BI, all you've done is give a big subsidy to landowners.

But they can't, because UBI is a redistributive scheme; without price discrimination based on income before both UBI and the taxes funding it, you can't adjust rents to capture it.

Re:Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supp... by SilasX on Monday November 13, 2017 @05:09PM (#15690741)
>We actually do, both when it is driven by rational (e.g., shifting money into a monopolized market) and irrational (encouraging time-deferred costs that people are known empirically to discount) forces.

"It's driven by rational and irrational forces" isn't an explanation.

>But they can't, because UBI is a redistributive scheme; without price discrimination based on income before both UBI and the taxes funding it, you can't adjust rents to capture it.

So you're saying the bridge scenario didn't and can't happen?

Re:Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supp... by dragonwriter on Monday November 13, 2017 @05:44PM (#15690989)
> "It's driven by rational and irrational forces" isn't an explanation.

Nor was it posed as one, it is your condensation of my description (which also includes specific examples in each category) of broad classes of sources which we understand very well that produce the described effect.

> So you're saying the bridge scenario didn't and can't happen?

I was not saying anything about the bridge scenario, which is structurally unlike a UBI and thus a non-useful analogy. Though, sure, I would say that the bridge example reads a lot like more like a parable than a historical account, and politicians constructing such parables with weak, if any, factual basis is about as uncommon as ocean spray containing salt. More to the point, it's exactly about one f the specific examples I gave of effects we understand quite well.

Re:Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supp... by SilasX on Monday November 13, 2017 @09:23PM (#15692118)
The bridge example is economically equivalent to not buying out the bridge but giving everyone the amount necessary to pay daily tolls. Why wouldn’t rents go up (in either scenario)?

Do you deny generally that rents go up with public infrastructure? Or that lifting a toll would raise rents (because it now becomes a more desirable place to live)? Or, which supply/demand curves do you think differ here from the UBI case?

Re:Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supp... by dragonwriter on Tuesday November 14, 2017 @01:01AM (#15693016)
> The bridge example is economically equivalent to not buying out the bridge but giving everyone the amount necessary to pay daily tolls. Why wouldn’t rents go up (in either scenario)?

They would go up; but, absent a perfect monopoly (which real property available for rent is usually not subject to in even the short term), it would be unlikely to go up the exact amount of the subsidy (considering only the effect of the subsidy).

> Or, which supply/demand curves do you think differ here from the UBI case?

The difference is that its a lot more plausible for residential rental property in a particular locality to be effectively monopolized than for that to be the national norm. And, to the extent the effect is under consideration is real, it is explicitly a monopoly effect.

Re:Free Money: The Surprising Effects of a Basic Income Supp... by mrguyorama on Monday November 13, 2017 @04:24PM (#15690386)
From my point of view, people who push for basic income also tend to push for things such as rent control. They see wealth/capital consolidation as a bad thing to ban.