Game theory, it’s in the interest of every landlord if prices go up a little, so the overwhelming majority will raise rent.
Fact is only so much stuff is made and only so much space exists and only so many people exist to make and build etc. Money is just an abstraction for allocating those resources. Broadly speaking the market would adjust and everything would remain the same for 95% of people. The HOPE of UBI advocates is that, after adjustments to prices, the UBI would have an impact on that last 5%.
orcrist@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I don’t see any need to abolish minimum wage. The pressures that you’re talking about would allow people to quit those horrible minimum wage jobs, but there’s no strong argument for saying that the minimum wage itself should go away.
sushibowl@feddit.nl 3 months ago
The general argument for getting rid of minimum wage is that there is a whole bunch of work out there which is simply not valuable enough to be profitable if the labour must be paid at minimum wage prices, and so those jobs simply aren’t available right now.
The trade-off is that it guarantees laborers are able to afford a basic life with their jobs, which greatly reduces the ability of capitalists to prey on the working class. However with UBI that problem isn’t so big anymore, so there’s theoretically no need for a minimum wage.
orcrist@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I hear you. At the same time, minimum wage also ties into laws against wage theft. So maybe we shouldn’t take it off the shelf for a good long while, at least until wage theft can be cut to reasonably low levels. Good luck to us on that front, though.