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Without money to move, there is no economic growth. There are supply-side problems, and demand-side problems.

Sowell's example is woefully incomplete. He's talking only of limited, unique physical goods. He's not talking about things where production can increase in response to demand. He's not talking about services. And bluntly, UBI isn't there to help people buy beach houses, and won't cause enough inflationary pressure on beach houses to make a damn bit of difference on their price. It's there to help people afford a car, or child care, or medical bills, or any of the countless things that plague the poor rabble in this country.

Spare productive capacity is why UBI is feasible in the first place. The economy is producing more than people can afford to buy, and the machinery that makes it so productive is displacing jobs they need to afford anything at all.

If you're reading Sowell, you should read Yang's book. He addresses this stuff. He's not just treating UBI as a golden hammer. It's a straightforward, workable way to cope with a lot of problems that keep us from coping with other problems.

If technological advances wipe out 10% or more of existing jobs in the next couple of decades with no replacements in sight, what do we do? Blame them for being lazy? Retrain those truck drivers as computer programmers so they can get those hot programming jobs in their population 800 midwestern town? And move those local startups into the strip mall that closed because retail got wiped out by Amazon? If we don't do something about it, there will be blood in the streets, sooner or later. That's a much bigger problem than taxes.

[AnimalMuppet]

> Without money to move, there is no economic growth.

Of course there is. You can have an economy without money. It's barter, but it's still an economy, and it can still have growth.

And, of course UBI isn't for buying beach houses. That was to illustrate the problem in an obvious way, not to be directly relevant.

> The economy is producing more than people can afford to buy

You have also claimed that UBI will grow the economy. If it's already producing more than people can afford to buy, first, why would it grow the economy, and second, why should we regard that as a good thing?

Since you seem to be misreading my position fairly consistently, let me try to be more clear. My claim is not that UBI is necessarily a bad thing. My claim is not that UBI is unneeded. My claim is not that the poor are doing fine. My claim is that your claim that UBI will grow the economy is highly suspect.

[beat]

Barter is even more of an absurdist corner case than Sowell's beach houses. It doesn't contribute to the question of whether UBI will grow the economy.

Ok, let's take this from another angle. Does bankruptcy at a large scale help the economy? Foreclosure? Homelessness? It seems reasonable to me that people are more likely to contribute to the economy if they aren't bankrupt and homeless. It seems likely that their children are more likely to become successful contributors.

And it's obvious that UBI can reduce these problems substantially. After all, homelessness isn't caused by a shortage of homes. It's caused by financial distribution problems. So right there, we have an opportunity for growth.

Now, I'm not arguing that UBI will totally pay for itself here either. But it seems likely to produce some economic growth, just because it does the most for the people currently least able to participate in the economy, and that's a majority of the population.