Comment on German experiment gave people a basic monthly income – the effect on their work ethic was surprising
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 6 days agoIf there’s only one grocery store, maybe. But that’s a monopoly, and that’s going to be shit no matter what. Ideally you have multiple grocery stores that compete, and if one raises prices the other will take their customers. (If they all coordinate to raise their prices, that’s a cartel and that’s also bad.)
So you’re not really exposing a problem with UBI, but rather with unregulated capitalism.
rikudou@lemmings.world 6 days ago
We live in a real world, not a hypothetical scenario. There are multiple stores and they’re all either in a cartel or just blindly copying each other in extracting the maximum value out of their customers.
This brings them more money, they pump more into marketing and voilà, only the shitty stores remain. If a newcomer joins, you can enjoy a few pretty good years until they inevitably join the shitty cartel or cease to exist.
So yeah, that’s a problem of capitalism but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem to make UBI actually ever work.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 6 days ago
I don’t think “This other, largely unrelated, problem is bad so we shouldn’t do this thing” is good reasoning.
I don’t think in the real world, in all places (or even most places) all the stores are in a cartel. Where I live, there are several large supermarkets and a handful of smaller groceries all within walking distance. They are not a cartel. They compete. You’re just making stuff up for some weird dark fantasy of yours.
Furthermore, if there was a monopoly, and we have the political might to implement UBI, I dare say we’d also have the political power to do a tried-and-true popular move of breaking up monopolies.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
But we’ve already seen this without UBI. So worst case, nothing changes. Best case? There’s more opportunity for change.