[snapplebobapple]

Why do so many people make the same analytical error? It's really simple what is going on: information and power asymmetries are used to accumulate more wealth and therefore power. This happens through a whole bunch of mechanisms usually referred to as market power abuse in economics all centered around getting control of a pain point that makes it less likely people will leave for a competitor and then pushing prices down (think chain restaurants saturating a region and only offering minimum wage, think the app economy getting you on the app and watching your every move to price your labor as low as possible, think larger companies spending money on lobyists to push new regulations to decrease competition and kill start ups)

The government is implicit in a lot of this when it should be doing stuff like breaking up big companies to curtail it. UBI and VAT would just exacerbate the actual problem because it would grow the government and the government would eventually just get captured again (or stay captured) and be put to work ensuring the wealth keeps flowing to a select few.