[_yoqn]

I hear you, and I agree that there are definitely problems with wages in this country. But the thing to really understand is that the value of money is the collective value of the goods and services exchanged in the economy. It's really just that simple. You need to produce, personally, real value in order to get enough money to acquire the services of another (room and board of some kind). There are exceptions to this rule of course (stock market, currency market and commodities speculators, looking at you). Think about this long and hard and anyone can see the connections between value traded for value. This is why a free market is the best possible solution to a large economy. When government gets involved, their authoritarian solutions (take money from one person and give it to another, without the exchange of true value) will never have long term workability.

If someone wants to work a minimum wage job in America, they should not expect to be able to acquire luxury goods or anything of great value other than being able to subsist. It's nothing against them, it's just that the value being provided by the worker is not generally that valuable. This is in itself a UBI of sorts. Nobody inherently has the right to simply take from another (food, shelter, healthcare) simply for being alive and providing nothing in return. But showing up to a job and clocking in and clocking out every day, and doing one's job will bring in some return and you can then go out and exchange that for survival needs.

Now if you want to live a little better you're going to want to provide more value than is expected and you will get more return on that. A simple example is waiting tips. I have definitely tipped bigger for service people who put in extra value. And above all else, morale and general happiness of a culture goes up when people are producing and exchanging HIGH VALUE.

This is not the economy taught in schools. "Economics" as a subject has been mired down so thoroughly in complexity, trapdoors and dead ends nobody can agree on anything, and socialism and communism emerge as great concepts. It's just that "nobody has quite implemented socialism [which is communism] correctly" and thus resulted in untold suffering, misery and death throughout the ages. If communism is so great then why do so many people flee socialist and communist countries and try to make it to the USA? Because we have a FREE MARKET. Not total government appropriations and grants, yet.

[kelnos]

It's hard to take this seriously, since no economy in the world (that we know of) in reasonably-modern times has been a free market.

I feel like the opposite of what you say is true: as economies grow past a certain point, market regulation is essential to avoid monopolistic practices and winner-take-all situations.

If the US was a true free market, our income inequality problems would be even worse, and we'd live in a de-facto corporatocracy. No thank you.

[_yoqn]

I think that if the US were a true free market we would have seen certain banks go bankrupt in 2008 and a more honest (or at least less stupid) system of banking take its place. Yes there would be pain, but there is already pain in other forms. You can't spray perfume on a rotten steak to make it any less of a problem. How about regulation that's supposed to protect consumers from big evil corporations are the same that prevent smaller players from getting a substantial foothold in the game and posing any kind of threat to the big players.

Look, I don't have all the answers but I do know that without the exchange of value for value as the basic unit of economic strength there will be confusion, waste and contraction in a society.