[alanwatts]

What about a BI based on resources rather than the dollar? There already exists a renewable surplus of food, water, and shelter.

There are around 4-6 empty houses in the US for every homeless person and around 40% of food goes to waste.

So providing for the most basic physiological needs of the ~45 million impoverished people in the US is not a problem of production, it's a problem of distribution and waste management.

[brbsix]

See the economic calculation problem as outlined by Mises. There's no way to efficiently allocate resources absent a price mechanism.

Also, how are you supposed to acquire all these resources in the first place? It's kind of an important detail.

[alanwatts]

I read the first bit of Mises theory, which is full of fallacy from the start:

>The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how a good or service should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for it.

This is a catch-22. Normal people are given a highly limited amount of money, the supply of which is arbitrarily dictated by a handful of bankers. So the ultimate power of setting prices lies with them. This is explicitly outlined as one of the three main objectives of the Federal Reserve: maintaining stable prices.

>The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability which in turn allows, on the basis of individual consensual decisions, corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses;

If this were true, there wouldn't be 4-6 empty houses for every homeless person, or starving people when vast surpluses of food exist around the corner. There is no such thing as a "free market" and yet the ideology of one persists as a way to prevent any such innovation.

[alanwatts]

>There's no way to efficiently allocate resources absent a price mechanism

Obviously math and science would be involved. However, the dollar is not created based on a mathematical or scientific standard, it is created by a handful of oligarchs based on closed source subjective speculation and confidence, "voodoo economics", and the broken window fallacy.

>how are you supposed to acquire all these resources in the first place?

The resources don't need to be acquired, they're already sitting there. They just need to be shared. So empathy for humanity is where the real deficit lies, and one of the main reasons for this is the fallacy of Malthusian-Darwinian economic ideology.