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I don't know if this has been brought up already, but say UBI has been implemented. What is stopping industry leaders from colluding to raise the prices on food, gas, medicine, and any other good with inelastic demand, sidestepping inflation, and essentially making people wage slaves again?
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Jun 17, 2017 16:56
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Coolguye posted:the same anti trust and anti collaboration laws that keep them from doing it today It does have to do with UBI, though, and it's part of the problem of universal healthcare as well. Why are hospital bills so high? If the government is going to foot the bill, it has to have some leverage or means of price control, which is not put into law at this time.
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Jun 17, 2017 17:12
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Doc Hawkins posted:When the government pays for all healthcare, it has overwhelming leverage to set prices. Ok, well let's apply that to UBI where it is not paying companies directly. I assume UBI will have to keep pace with the cost of living. How will the government exert control over multiple industries that contribute to the "cost of living"? It's not like they can just go, "hey, you need to do something about these prices or we're not paying you" when they are paying the consumers. Monsanto, for instance, could manufacture a shortage of pesticide chemicals, which will affect the prices of those goods the pesticides are used on (which could cover quite a lot of food products). Sure, you can argue "oh, we have laws to prevent that", but you forget about the burden of proof and the fiasco that is our legal system. By the time the manufactured shortage has been investigated and punished (if it ever was), the cost of living has been raised by who knows how much, and the government is stuck raising UBI with no recourse to fix the actual issue.
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Jun 17, 2017 17:40
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You sound like a pretty intelligent individual with a higher level of education than I do. You've made some really good points, but I have counterpoints that I need explained in order for me to buy into it.Coolguye posted:already missing the point. the majority of UBI schemes implemented worldwide are not scheduled to do this, because 'cost of living' is a regional and local thing. UBI is supposed to keep pace with basic life support, not cost of living, which has different meanings based upon where you live, what your family situation is, etc. It only seems fair that the federal government would allocate money to the states to pay out based on estimated cost of living. Obviously there is no one-size-fits-all number that will evenly bring "prosperity" to the citizens of every city, county, state...whatever. Coolguye posted:the government already exerts an insane amount of control over all the industries involved in basic life support. in the USA you have: All you've listed off are reasons why the price of goods increase for each industry. If I was the head of a major corporation--and not being very smart--this would be a convenient excuse for me to drum up a scheme to raise prices when this sudden windfall of UBI money falls into the hands of my target consumer base. Coolguye posted:you've already presumed a blatant market manipulation that would get Monsanto slapped with an antitrust suit so fast your head would spin. Yes, it was blatant, and no, I am not intelligent enough to come up with a truly intriguing scheme for price fixing. While, yes, some companies do get prosecuted, there are plenty of others that fall by the wayside. Case in point: Do you remember gas prices in 2011? Can you explain to me why they were so outrageous at the time? Sure, you can cite the war in Iraq, Saudi Arabia's production, and price fuckery on the futures market, but explain to me why the US was affected so when we are fully capable of producing enough of our own oil to meet the country's demand? You are aware that oil is one of our major exports, right? Why the christ was gas so expensive and what could the government do about that in the future to negate big oil's, for instance, ability to manipulate prices like that again and take a huge chunk out of the purchasing power of UBI? Coolguye posted:wrong. have you ever actually looked at an antitrust suit brought by the government? the bell systems was broken up by court order in 1983 because they couldn't produce adequate evidence to defeat accusations of price fixing and anti-competitive control, and microsoft was slapped with tens of millions in legal fees and forced to open its industry secrets to the world in 2002 because they couldn't show that apple had a reasonable chance of taking them down. this is not a criminal case where the accused is innocent until proven guilty. the standard is a preponderance of evidence for either side, as this is a civil case. however, it's a civil case that is executed for a political agenda, and the politicians own the playing field, so in practice and from actual legal precedent, the defendant is at a disadvantage and carries the burden of proof, just like you do when you show up to traffic court and say "i didn't run that red light, judge". you're not getting off from 'reasonable doubt' when the cop that ticketed you says "yes he did". this is how slanted it was when these corporations were dealing with phones and computers - things literally nobody needs to keep breathing. you honestly expect that politicians would be any nicer to a loving food company, knowing that they're the ones first against the wall when people start starving? i'm gonna need to see your figures on that. I see where you are going with this, and thank you for citing actual cases with dates. My problem with this is how the US government intends to prosecute post-2008. Maybe it's just the financial industry that is exempt? I think it's fair to acknowledge the paradigm shift post-recession.
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Jun 18, 2017 05:49
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Coolguye posted:I think what you're actually concerned about is that nobody was guillotined for the mammoth amounts of hubris and incompetence in the 2008 crisis, which i feel is completely fair. but that has nothing to do with the articulated point of market making and price fixing that you're talking about, and has no actual relevance to the merit or downfall of UBI as a concept; that is an inherent problem in capitalism that marx pointed out close to a hundred years ago now. capitalist economies tend toward a bubble that results in a painful loss for common people every 10-15 years or so. the data has proven him to be mostly correct about this. it's just as correct to say that planned economies that he generally advocated tend toward complete implosion on the same general time scale, though, so again: what is your alternative? without an alternative it's just a vague boogeyman concern troll. Yes, part of this argument is me projecting my recession fears onto an otherwise good idea. If the recession taught me anything it's that, 1) there are some really intelligent business men and women that constantly try to find ways to "repackage" things in an attempt to siphon money from the consumer, 2) when companies can reduce their risk to near-zero, they get greedy, and bubbles happen, and 3) when enough companies in an industry sign on to said scheme, major price fluctuations happen. You said, "the number one role of government is to build trust...". Since we're already going the route of socialism with universal healthcare and basic income, shouldn't the government be able to legislate the so-called cyclic bubbles out of our system? Whether it's price controls, or, ironically, nationalism, I don't know the solution, but that is my alternative. Coolguye posted:lol 2011 is actually a counter-example of your entire argument dude. you loving said yourself, 'fully capable of producing our own oil to meet the country's demands'. a bad actor in the global market (specifically, it was OPEC and chiefly saudi arabia) engaged in price manipulation OUTSIDE of our laws, eg, the ones that we're ostensibly talking about, and better actors INSIDE our laws took steps to counteract it. did you check the price of oil a mere 4 years after 2011? the price had over halved and it remains depressed today because the bad actors made it profitable for people operating under good laws and good regulation to go do poo poo. and the industry did this while struggling to retrain and staff petroleum platforms of all kinds because it was loving 2011 and everyone was too broke to afford retraining. a UBI would have made that entire shift a lot, lot easier. Around 2015, the prices went down because of more fuckery by OPEC. Saudi Arabia oversupplied crude, which pushed a lot of small-to-medium companies in the US out of business, due to the fact that margins were too small to repay their debt, much less turn a profit. The North Dakota Bakken formation that we heard so much about was hit especially hard. My point about the oil is this: we supply enough to meet our own demand, couldn't there be some legislation that re-channels our exports to meet our own demands, instead of importing crude at hosed up prices? Yes, I'm aware that that opens up a whole other can of worms about isolationism/protectionism, free market, yadda yadda, but hear me out. Wouldn't the decrease in tax revenue from oil companies be offset by the reduced impact on consumer spending as a whole, especially as it pertains to the added purchasing power of UBI? Moose_Knuck has issued a correction as of 07:54 on Jun 18, 2017 |
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Jun 18, 2017 07:24
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Coolguye posted:that is the planned economy. government goes out and tells people what they are doing in terms of production these year and manages everything on behalf of the citizenry. in this way, speculation is impossible and bubbles don't exist. the only planned economy left on the planet is north korea's - all of the rest of them brought stagnation, misery, and deprivation to the people it ostensibly served. and North Korea currently starves its people to build nukes on a regular basis so they arguably are already imploded and are just waiting for the counting to start in economic terms. if this is ostensibly socialism then it's socialism gone too far and again, all the data is very unambiguous about this. there's a lot of reasons why planned economies don't work but that's beyond the scope of this post. for the purposes of this thread you're advocating the policy that lost the second world the Cold War. I'm down with everything you said, but this. I don't buy that because it hasn't worked before that it can't work. How many start-ups go out of business before one finally succeeds? Isn't the Fed's monetary policy essentially "planned economy"? I'm not advocating for absolutism, I'm really not, but something as simple as limiting the leverage a company can employ would do wonders to smooth out the cyclic bubbles you were referring to earlier. EDIT: I'm talking about companies with a certain market cap. Obviously, limiting a start-up's ability to employ leverage would hinder it's growth potential, while also not being large enough to noticeably affect the economy as a whole. Moose_Knuck has issued a correction as of 04:43 on Jun 19, 2017 |
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Jun 19, 2017 04:36
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Funny, but please don't poo poo on the guy, especially because he's making interesting effort posts. How rare are effort posts?
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Jun 19, 2017 16:58
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And back on topic (slightly), what are increases to UBI based on if not the cost of living? Is it some arbitrary, made-up measure specifically for UBI? Also, how would the initial payout be decided? "Hey, let's go throw 16 grand on these guys because that sounds right" isn't doing it for me.
Moose_Knuck has issued a correction as of 18:06 on Jun 19, 2017 |
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Jun 19, 2017 17:05
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GlyphGryph posted:Why are all your questions so bad? I fixed that for you. I think the problem comes to down to the way we are throwing the terms around. In my mind, "basic life support" and cost of living are synonymous. Perhaps you educated folk are referring to the theoretical cost-of-living index when you make your arguments? I should re-phrase then: what would this "basic life support" index look like if that is going to be the basis of UBI? Also, will it have an inflation metric or will there be some type of fixed increase?
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Jun 19, 2017 21:38
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Ok, now you just sound pretentious. How is basic life support not regionally specific? Are you talking about providing the actual goods to support life? If you are thinking about throwing money at the situation, I'm sorry, but your $800 might work in Alabama, but it's not going to work in New York City. Or perhaps there is a figure that will cover all possible locales, like say, $5,000/month? Well, where is the equality in that? I would own Birmingham with that sort of income. That is, ofcourse, if stores didn't magically start marking up goods to reflect my new source of income. Maybe when we can all source our goods needed to support life from the same place there won't be any regional bias, but until you can get your organic produce shipped to your house from Amazon you still have to factor in regional price differences. Moose_Knuck has issued a correction as of 22:02 on Jun 19, 2017 |
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Jun 19, 2017 21:51
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Lindsey O. Graham posted:a screed about pigs flying was written here I don't know if you were trying to trigger me or what, but I was actually advocating for a similar proposal--not so eloquently put--earlier.
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Jun 19, 2017 22:40
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