At the risk to be called a socialist or communist, I am going to share something that I have been thinking a lot lately.
The free market doesn't limits itself to just products and services, it also includes charity. And the current forms of charities we have right know on the free market are rather ineffective and barley cover the demand. It is basically begin by yourself or having someone else beg for you, which is annoying and ineffective.
Most of the charity programs cover the minority of people like the homeless, people with severe disease etc. The majority of people who need charity in the western world are people who can't afford a private pension to retire, or people who are sick and can't work, single parents etc. As far as I know there is nobody competing with the government for this charitable causes.
You see the market always gets what it wants, and what the market wants right know is free money, sadly the only people who are willing to give away free money are governments and banks. And the problem with this is that they do so by stealing from everybody, keep the majority of what they take and then they give very little to the poor.
Generally the people who are talking about UBI have the tendency to lean towards the left, they believe in the necessity of a big government, taxes and laws.
The problem with the government implementing UBI, is that in order to pay everybody they would either need to increase taxes, print more money or barrow money. No matter which one of these strategies you are going to chose it means that you are using coercion to extort money from some people and give to others, which creates a double standard, and double standards lead to more unfairness. Creating pretty much the opposite of what the UBI is trying to accomplish.
At the end of the day you cant make the world more fair by treating a minority of people very unfairly even if those are the rich of the world. In order to take money from the rich you have to give someone authority over everybody to steal for you. Which in reality if you look at history you end up with a corrupted mess, and an even more unfair world.
If the government is going to implement UBI is going to make certain people that are working for the government very rich. It is bad enough currently that the richest people in the world are not the most productive member of society that offer the most amount of value to society, but a bunch of bankers and bureaucrats. If all the bankers and bureaucrats of the world would disappear we are probably going to be OK if not better, on the other hand if the people who are providing direct services to you like the people who pick up your trash or your internet provider, is going to have much worse consequences to your life.
Implementing UBI in the current governance system it is only going to increase inequality.
However I can't help to imagine how the world it is going to look like if something like UBI could be implemented, at least in theory it looks like it is going to solve a lot of the problem humanity had since the beginnings.
Now we have the technology to create our own money without the need of an intermediary or use something with real intrinsic value like gold.
If we are going to use block-chain technology to implement UBI, the many are going to be distributed by software eliminating the need of an actually institution to do so. And this is great because software doesn't become corrupt, beside that there will be competition, there will be multiple charity programs competing with each-other which is the way free market deals with corruption.
The money are going to go from the software to the majority of the people, who are going to save it or spent it on products or services from the minority of people who are still providing this. It is safe to speculate that the majority of people are going to spend their share, and this is going to concentrate the money in the hands of the most productive members of society, while allows everybody else to live comfortably.
At the end of the day the money are just a universal value for resources. It allows us to more effectively exchange resource, and particularly it allows others to profit from their own labor. Nobody really owns the natural resources, the only resource you own is your own labor. Which is protected through property rights. If you own a piece of land and plant some corn on it you want to be able to profit from the products of your labor at the end of the day and be able to defend it if someone is attempting to steal it.
But you don't own the carbon matter or the sun rays that are falling on the surface of than land or the rain. Nobody really owns those, there are natural resources that are on a continuous cycle, it is nearly impossible to horde renewable resources.
All animals that are on the earth including human beings are entitle to take whatever they need from the earth in order to sustain themselves. as well they are entitle to profit from their own labor.
When your only income comes from exchanging your labor for resources created by other people labor, you have the risk of the products of your labor becoming absolute, true being out-competed by your competition or labor saving devices. Which means that you know have no way of sustaining yourself.
The value that you are creating to share equally with everybody, comes from the earth. Not from the rich or the bank, in theory nobody should be getting screwed.
In order to cover all the costs of paying people monthly, you will need an inflationary coin, where the amount of money is going to be determinate by calculation done automatically by software, not only to cover new people who join the program but also to maintains the value you give to each individual.
In the current system, inflation is bad for two reasons. First of all it makes it impossible to save money because by constantly increasing the money, the value of money depreciates, and you can end up in the situation where you will end up buying a cup of coffee with your life time savings.
The second bad effect of inflation is that if you depreciate the money and destroy the buying power of the money you can buy less with the money you make, which creates the illusion that all the prices increase constantly. Which in fact is the money depreciating.
This problem exist in a single monetary system, where everybody is forced to use the same money that are controlled by a centralized power.
In theory if I create my own form of money and I constantly create more and more, yes we will have the same problems it will make it impossible for people to save money and they will be able to buy less and less with the money you give them.
But if we use more than one form of money and you have a few limited coins on the market like bitcoin, the value off all the prices should remain stable in bitcoin ass well as it is a stable store of value.
If you give everybody let's say a thousand dollars a month this means that because you pay them in an inflationary currency the more you pay them the less the money you give them are actually worth. In order to mitigate this problem you have to pay everybody more each month to adjust for inflation, like this they receive still the value of a thousand dollars each month. We might use a more stable reference like gold because the US dollars are also an inflationary currency that will depreciate over time, however gold seems to be keeping his value over time.
Like most things it is a cost benefit analysis as nothing is perfect. Whenever you are gaining something you will lose something else.
As the chaos theory prescribes small changes like this can have big or catastrophically results. Giving poor people money is not only going to change the life of the poor but everyone's.
I would imagine that if you cover the basic cost of living of everybody, people with undesirable jobs are going to quit. This is going to change the job market, changing not only the salaries you need to pay to make this job attractive for people but also the prices of the product or services you provide in order to be able to pay your workers.
For example if you own a movie theater, and the cleaning lady quits her job, in order to get a new one you will have to attract people to do that job with more money, which means that you have to charge more for a ticket.
This means that all the products and services that are produce right know through cheap labor are going to get more expensive. This is if not are going to become automatized which a lot of them are in the danger to be.
We have an unhealthy relationship with all the things that I can think about that are produce through cheap labor, it encourages us to be wasteful and destructive.
If you have people who will pick-up your trash for cheap we produce a lot of trash and pay someone few bucks to cary it somewhere where we can't see it or smell it, which is completely unsustainable. Cheap clothes produced in sweatshops, most people buy clothes wear them few times after which they get in the back of the closet never to see the day light, next year they are probably going to be out of style anyway. The same is valid with electronics, cheap food etc. if the prices go up, which a lot won't because of automation, you can still be able to survive on a minimum basic income but you can't afford to be wasteful.
Another justify concern is to what is going to happen with people psychologically and socially. Are we all going to become lazy and unproductive?
Well energy doesn't get created or destroyed it can only be transformed. In theory the same energy that it is motivating you to get up from the bed it is still going to be there, only that it is going to have different priorities. I could argue that if people have their basic needs covered they are more likely to do things that makes them happy or to help others. A lot of the desperation in the business is going to dye down, that urge to make others pay you in order for you and your family to don't die of starvation.
It is the Maslow hierarchy of needs, when you get all your basic needs cover, your priority becomes self actualization. You get motivated by autonomy, creativity purpose etc. Rather than making enough money to pay bills or buy food. In a way is the next evolution the same agriculture eliminate the need for most people to go in to the forest and harvest berries and hunt daily, it freed them up to use their time and energy to do something else that is productive with their lives.
I wouldn't be able to promise you that this is not going to have any negative effects on some people, like amplify their self destructive tendencies and addictions. I am sure that there will be some cases like that.
Another thing that we have to be aware of is to don't artificially increase the population of the planet artificially to more than it can support. It seems that the highest concentration of people are in poor and under developed areas where they have high rates of poverty. There is a lot of data that suggests that this is a biologically adaptation that all mammals have. Whenever they live in a though environment where they're children have a low chance of success they have an increased desire to make more children, because that gives them higher changes of at least some of the kids to survive or become successful.
There might actually be a decrease in population over time, as many areas are lifted out of poverty and you offer people decent condition to live in.
Some example of free market initiatives that get close to the principle of UBI is YouTube. The content is being distributed and made available to everybody for free unconditionally. The people who provide the most amount of value through content are the ones that will make the most amount of money. The whole program is founded by various companies, through advertising various real life products and services. That are naturally limited by the amount of available resources.
YouTube is such a successful free market initiative that is taking a lot of the audience of the older conventional ways to distribute news and entertainment, by offering it for free to everybody unconditionally, while simultaneously offering many a way to make an income.
However there are some problem with regulations that lead to some people to be demonetized, on content that was actually very popular, but that was mitigated relatively easy to other third parties like Patreon or even the possibility of competition stepping in and offering a new platform.
