Sign up, and CougarBoard will remember which categories you want to view. Sign up
Jan 17, 2017
3:14:57pm
Zenoch All-American
Good writeup about the weaknesses of UBI (Universal Basic Income)
https://mises.org/blog/dangers-universal-basic-income

UBI is something being talked about in some countries. It is a guaranteed income for every citizen.

Some quotes:

"The universal basic income shares another problem with traditional welfare systems. Far from promoting the unemployed from searching for work the market rewards, it actually subsidizes non-productive activities. The struggling entrepreneurs and artists mentioned earlier are struggling for a reason. For whatever reason, the market has deemed the goods they are providing to be insufficiently valuable. Their work simply isn’t productive according to those who would potentially consume the goods or services in question. In a functioning marketplace, producers of goods the consumers don't want would quickly have to abandon such endeavors and focus their efforts into productive areas of the economy. The universal basic income, however, allows them to continue their less-valued endeavors with the money of those who have actually produced value, which gets to the ultimate problem of all government welfare programs."

"In the marketplace, wealth is earned by generating value. When someone buys a good, they’ve earned the money they are spending by having produced something else. This is not so with welfare programs like a universal basic income. Money is forcibly taken from those who have produced enough to earn it, and given to those who haven’t. This allows for people who aren’t producing wealth to continue to consume scarce goods. Eventually, all government welfare leads to the consumption of wealth, or, at the very least, a reduction in the amount of wealth that would have been accumulated otherwise. When entrepreneurs have less need to respond to the needs and desires of their customers, consumers will find themselves with fewer choices and with lower-quality choices.This means that overall welfare makes everyone poorer than they would have been in a free market."

.......


"As has always been the case, it is necessary to create wealth before it is possible to redistribute it, and policies that encourage movement toward less productive types of work will fail to produce the wealth that government planners would like to spread around."
Zenoch
Previous username
Jett
Bio page
Zenoch
Joined
Mar 29, 2002
Last login
Mar 28, 2024
Total posts
17,176 (196 FO)