[kiba]

Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.

This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.

But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.

[triceratops]

> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords

Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.

[FireBeyond]

Not necessarily? Not that we've had one recently at the federal level, but there are multiple studies that show that state or city level minimum wage bumps tend to show an increase in average rental price, by the same percentage, within sometimes as few as four months.

[triceratops]

You have to live in or near the city to collect the higher minimum wage. With UBI you could live anywhere. Even outside the country maybe. They aren't comparable.

[kiba]

UBI doesn't fix this because whereever someone live will start the process of someone absorbing income, regardless if it's income or not. You need to break the chain between income of people and land ownership by taxing land ownership.

[triceratops]

Land ownership is taxed. With UBI someone could buy land out in the boonies and put down a trailer and just live there.

[autoexec]

There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.

[Spooky23]

You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.

These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.

[rangestransform]

Orienting policy around individual home ownership just ends up eventually with more people’s voting interests aligned with landowners, and is part of the reason why increasing property values and NIMBYism is so entrenched in American government structures

[autoexec]

We could definitely stand to orient some policy around making sure that first time homeowners aren't typically buying their starter homes at age 40. Having voting interests aligned with landowners wouldn't be a bad thing if most people were landowners.

[kiba]

Doesn't really fix the problem. All you done is distribute unearned income to a larger class of people.

People's labor and capital will get absorbed by land ownership.

You need to tax it.

[triceratops]

There's an argument that landlording gets entirely too favorable treatment from the tax code compared to any other type of business or investment. Seriously proposing eliminating property rentals is weapons-grade stupid.

[triceratops]

How would they do that if housing is plentiful?

[9rx]

> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market

Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.

The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.

[upboundspiral]

Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.

Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?

[TurdF3rguson]

Other countries? Asia seems to be able to make a living off of rice farming, and their secret is not going into debt investing in $1M harvesters.