I don't buy this argument. Businesses that do this would be leaving money on the table: namely the poor people that were outside of their total addressable market. Whereas before those folks would never have been able to provide revenue, with more cash in their pockets, they are now potential consumers. Increasing prices just maintains the same TAM for no real reason — you can make more revenue by serving the newly minted consumers.
The only good/service for which this breaks down is housing, for which there is a true supply scarcity — but even that ceases to be true in a regime with proper zoning reform (like Japan).
Not nearly as much as it needs to be. Indiana imports 90% of its calories. What does it take to get vegetables grown near Indianapolis?
> our food supply is highly distributed.
I meant this in the sense of diversity if firms, not geographically. We've certainly seen consolidation with some of the bigger agri-conglomerates, and the trends are worrying, but we are nowhere near monopolization of the industry as a whole.
From Wikipedia:
> The 2012 US Census of Agriculture indicates that 5.06 percent of US farms are corporate farms. These include family corporations (4.51 percent) and non-family corporations (0.55 percent). Of the family farm corporations, 98 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Of the non-family farm corporations, 90 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area. Family farms (including family corporate farms) account for 96.7 percent of US farms and 89 percent of US farmland area;[17] a USDA study estimated that family farms accounted for 85 percent of US gross farm income in 2011.
There are plenty of issues with our food supply system. But I don't think we need to worry about monopolies raising prices unilaterally. The OP thought we needed price controls to keep food costs low. I don't think this in the case. The problems are instead on the poverty side of the equation. Who has the money to pay for our (generally pretty cheap) food? The are too many that are food insecure, not because groceries are expensive, but because they are in poverty.
While advertisers like to claim that they are merely improving distribution of information (bringing us closer to that mythical "perfect information" assumption about competitive markets), in practice they mostly do the opposite.
That is, taking advantage of cognitive biases to sell people things they don't need, increasing net market participant irrationality.
US government injected about 3 trillion worth of liquidity into the country since the start of the coronavirus, similar to how UBI of $1000/month to every single adult would cost. And did you see any price rise?
the other aspect is, no amount of ubi is going to cover huge medical costs that the current u.s system incurs, as well as higher education for those thst really do want to improve themselves and contribute
so (i think) ubi isnt a bad idea, but it needs to be coupled with other structural reforms and price controls to prevent being a huge potential diaster