Comment by pfannkuchen a day ago
Is that the topic of discussion? I thought it was something along the lines of “tax the rich so we can do things with the money”. That is the area I’m saying it is a no-op in. Statements without context frequently don’t mean the same as what they mean with context.
But by doing this you are just making everything else more expensive, that’s the point.
Printing money and spending it on those projects would have literally the same effect.
I’m responding to what I infer as the notion that people must have to say what they say about UBI, which is the implicit “we will pay for X and that will be it” not “we will make other goods more expensive in order to have X, and how we are happening to implement that is by taxing the rich”.
Like how about we just eliminate corporate-government corruption? Like there are a lot of shit business people today with a lot of shit politicians in their pockets, and many of them did not legitimately earn what they have, but is it really better to prevent the accumulation of capital over a certain amount? Then the powerful in your society are <checks notes> people who won a popularity contest.
I can’t tell if the commenter you replied to is being deliberately obtuse, or if they were literally born yesterday
No, I believe your understanding of the economic mechanisms involved is just too shallow to reason accurately in this area.
I’m certainly open to a direct counter argument, but all I’ve seen so far is tap dancing.
this argument ignores basic opportunity costs. taxing that wealth allows the state to redirect labor and materials production and distribution toward high-utility public goods: high-speed rail, dense urban cores, and affordable housing. instead of subsidizing insolvent suburbs, we could be modernizing the logistics network and actually growing the real economy.
worse, you completely miss the political dimension. hoarded wealth buys the lobbying power to prevent these necessary structural changes. you are engaging in the exact kind of apologetics that has led to american infrastructure collapsing while the capital class extracts rent. thinking that resource allocation is a 'no-op' is economically illiterate