this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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Futurology
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Trickle-down doesn't work. Trickle-up does.
You want rich people to have more money? Distribute funds to people, and let business compete for those new customers.
How do you avoid creating a "company store" though?
If you get UBI, you get to choose how to spend it. I'm not sure where the notion of a company store would come in?
Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I feel like someone's going to try to find a way to "farm" UBI the same way many other things have been farmed in the past. I chose "company store" to represent that because collusion could make prices of necessities just adjust to compensate.
I think you might be, but I get it.
Fact is, organizations do farm stuff like that whenever they can. Think prison commissary and telephone charges. They have a literal captive group of consumers who have no choice whatsoever. Oil companies and their gasoline.
When you broaden both the group of consumers to "everyone," and the things to be consumed to "everything," and the time frame to "always," it becomes nigh impossible for enough businesses to be on the same page with price gouging. Will there be some businesses that do? Of course. There already are. Enabling the people who are already being gouged to have more purchasing power - meaning more choices in what they purchase, who they purchase from, transportation, housing, healthcare, all sorts of things - that makes it harder for businesses to gouge, especially when we're talking about a wide swath of product and service types.