[breadbreadbread]

1. It's important to remember that having struggling poor people is expensive for the system. Emergency shelters, health issues that go untreated until they need emergency intervention, desperation crimes like theft (affecting policing and prisons), foster care, drug use intervention. These are all expenses that are reduced by a system like UBI. If you keep people healthy and fed, you can keep them peaceful and working and the program pays for itself.

2. I don't see the inflation effect as purely linear. Having $10 when things cost $10 is better than having $0 when things cost $5. There are thresholds that affect peoples ability to even engage with the market that you put your trust into. Also the market wants people to buy things, so it should welcome more people participating in it. And lets not forget that most of the price gouging over the past few years went straight to shareholder profits instead of increased supply costs, we can try to decentivize systems like that that profit off of economic crises.

> we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing

"letting markets do their thing" is contradictory to "fostering competition". Markets fundamentally drift towards consolidation. Source: the past sixty years. Markets do not fundamentally organically move towards progress. Often times the profitable thing is to pay workers shit wages and raise prices, and if you try to wait it out for a magical class of well financed competitors to come along and disrupt that status quo, millions of people will have been put into poverty in the interim.

[Turing_Machine]

> Markets fundamentally drift towards consolidation. Source: the past sixty years.

While I'm in favor of UBI (under certain conditions), the "past sixty years" don't back that up at all.

Fortune's top 10 corporations in 1960 (roughly 60 years ago)

1 General Motors

2 Exxon Mobil

3 Ford Motor

4 General Electric

5 U.S. Steel

6 Mobil

7 Gulf Oil

8 Texaco

9 Chrysler

10 Esmark

Top 10 corporations in 2020:

1 Walmart

2 Amazon

3 ExxonMobil

4 Apple

5 CVS Health

6 Berkshire Hathaway

7 United Health Group

8 McKesson

9 AT&T

10 AmeriSourceBergen

Only one company (Exxon/Mobil) is on both lists. Many of the companies on the 2020 list didn't even exist in 1960.

[piva00]

Sixty years is perhaps too long, neoliberalism really kicked off in the 80s/90s with an increase in globalisation, and corporate consolidation through M&As ramped up quickly in the 2000s after financialisation of the economy went in high gear. If we backtrack to the last thirty to forty years and check which top 20 companies got to that spot through M&As it might paint a different picture.

[Turing_Machine]

1990 list:

1 General Motors

2 Ford Motor

3 Exxon Mobil

4 Intl. Business Machines

5 General Electric

6 Mobil

7 Altria Group

8 Chrysler

9 DuPont

Again, Exxon Mobil is the only overlap with 2020's list. (I presume that the references to "Exxon Mobil" in the 1990 and 1960 lists actually refer to pre-merger Exxon, since Mobil by itself is also on both lists).

I checked, and of the 2020 list, only AT&T, McKesson, and Exxon even existed in 1960 (Berkshire Hathaway kinda did, but they made shirts. Warren Buffet didn't come along and turn it into an investment operation until 1965.

Edit: list formatting.