That rent control is bad is not exactly a new finding. This has been known to economists across the political spectrum for decades.
If someone is currently on $25k and gets a $10k basic income, their employer can lower their salary to $20k and they'll still be getting $5k more than they were before. (This won't happen immediately because people will be reluctant to take pay cuts, but I think it will in the longer term.)
Exactly how much of this difference the employee and employer capture in the longer term is a concern, but I think giving people the option to quit without starving will go a long way towards empowering them to insist on fair pay. I also think a result would be an increase job quality, because I think a lot of people would take a pay cut to work somewhere less awful if they could afford it.
Of course that money comes from taxes, so there's still a cost somewhere, but I'm not as convinced progressive taxes on the wealthy will have quite as big an impact on the costs to produce basic goods.
This is basic economics. (Seriously, this is in the easy stuff like Hazlitt.)
For an example, see joe's response.
If a would-be producer cannot source materials that would cost him less than the sale price, he just won't build the product.
[1] has more details on the subject.
I absolutely agree, and I think these justifiable and yet ill-defined concerns are shared by a lot of UBI opponents.
I just hope anyone trying to come to an informed decision remembers to include unrestrained capitalism's second-order effects on the pro/con list.
It sounds scary when put like that but it just means people free to interact, while secure from other social actors in their person and property. By the nature of voluntary configuration, interactions have a tendency toward being mutually beneficial, and there are corrective feedback loops that naturally exist in a voluntary society to reduce those that aren't (e.g. scammy operators increasingly excluded by increasing consumer vigilance and growing reputation markets).
And you can still have governments provisioning economic resources that qualify as public goods, like basic research, public information resources, policing and national defense, in such a setting, so there is no fundamental deficiency in unrestrained capitalism, aka an absolute free market.
Except a tendency toward consolidation and monopolies. And, inherent in the word "unrestrained", a tendency to use corporate money to unduly influence politics to benefit the corporation at the expense of the public interest.
> it just means people free to interact, while secure from other social actors in their person and property
It's kind of irrelevant anyway, all I really meant was UBI should be evaluated in comparison to "the status quo", whatever you choose to label it.
That assumes no government provisioning of public goods that can counteract capture of natural monopolies, but there's nothing inherent to a free market to prevent such government intervention.
>>And, inherent in the word "unrestrained", a tendency to use corporate money to unduly influence politics to benefit the corporation at the expense of the public interest.
The term here is "unrestrained capitalism", meaning people in possession of their right to contract and secure in their person/property, not "unrestrained society". An absolute free market doesn't mean anarchy. It doesn't preclude checks within the electoral and political process itself to prevent corruption. It doesn't prevent laws from being passed to place restrictions on those in public office, like, to give an extreme example, a lifetime ban on receiving any compensation from the private sector.
>>It's kind of irrelevant anyway, all I really meant was UBI should be evaluated in comparison to "the status quo"
Fair enough. I just take issue with the connotations of "unrestrained capitalism", where it implies malevolent behavior is legalized. A less biased term would be "free market".