Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it’s just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won’t. They’ll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
Sure, other stuff needs to change as well, but using currency for an UBI is the easiest and fastest way to implement it.
I mean… yeah… that’s what UBI is.
I was criticizing UBI as a concept, not how it’s implemented.
I find it funny who ubi proponents say we need UBI because capitalism failed to have wages match cost of living and simultaneously say UBI will fix it with capitalism.
Housing is expensive because there isn’t enough. If capitalism could fix it, then housing would have at a minimum matched inflation and should have decreased in price because of technology improvements. So giving people more money absolutely cannot fix the housing crisis. UBI would be a handout for landlords.
When demand is the problem in a supply/demand economy, you can’t fix it with more demand (cash).
Along with UBI, there also needs to be UBH, and other basic needs.
Capitalism means that they stop building before the price dips below wildly profitable, because capital is risk adverse. Capitalism won’t, not can’t, fix these problems.
A large institution may be risk averse. But a smaller firm trying to gain ground in the market would likely be more than happy to take on the risk and slimmer margins. After all, if capitalism wasn’t okay with slim margins, then restaurants and grocery stores wouldn’t exist.
Yes, and then that smaller firm fails because they take too many risks that have little chance of success. They end up being bought up by the larger firms, and all their assets put towards those higher value investments.
Sure, that could happen. But at that point, the smaller firm has already done its risky work so the people can benefit from it. And another small firm will step into the market to fill that niche.
New construction works on too long a time frame for this. It’s not liquid enough, and the level of capital you need to engage in the process is not trivial.
Given that capitalism is a system, not an individual with intention, “won’t” is the wrong word.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning, setbacks, parking minimums, or minimum floor areas; and because the perverse incentives of current taxation schemes regarding the inelastic supply of land don’t incentivize land owners to put their land to its highest and best use.
Housing is a bad example of capitalism failing because the problems developers face are extremely well known and understood. Remove the frivolous regulations, adopt a georgist tax policy, and build good public infrastructure, and you’ll get far more housing than you currently have far faster than you are currently building it. Could government do better? Maybe… but I have yet to see that evidence.
That’s not true because when given an opportunity to build housing, developers always choose to build higher margin premium housing. Capitalism incentivizes profit and there’s no profit in cheap housing.
There is plenty of profit to be made in cheap housing, just like there is plenty of profit to be made in cheap food. You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money, and the store that sold it, and trucker who transported it, and the farmer that grew it will all make money - despite food’s famously slim margins.
The situation with housing is more like this: the government has dictated that only 5 acres of land in the country can be used to grow tomatos. And each tomato plant can only grow a maximum of 10 tomatos. If you are a tomato farmer, what do you do? Well, since you can’t grow as many tomatos as you want, you start looking for ways to increase your margin on each tomato you sell - selling the most appealing, perfect, organic tomatos you can.
So it is with housing. When the government finally approves the development of some denser housing in a desireable part of town, the developer wants to build the highest margin housing that they can, since they won’t be able to build 50 more apartment buildings. So they build luxury apartments. However, if the government said “you can build as much and as densly as you like on any plot of land here”, then developers would probably start with more luxury housing, but would likely run out of luxury renters quite quickly. But then they would simply seek out more profit with the slimmer margins available in affordable housing development.
That happens unconditionally under capitalism, there’s no set profit margin where the owner says “I’ve made enough money, time to lower prices and raise wages”.
Competition only exists within a very narrow context within capitalism. If you want the capitalists to do x y z, you don’t deregulate, you simply restrict them from doing anything else and prepare to use every means the government has at their disposal to punish the ones who violate the public trust.
There’s a reason China manages to operate a healthier capitalist system within a very clearly defined bird cage.
Food is subsidized and highly regulated by the government.
You can go to the hardware store and buy a screwdriver. Or go to walmart and buy a frying pan. Etc.