It is possible that there is a counterbalancing effect of people being able to live outside of the big city, but I still suspect a form of "minimum rent" would arise in the case there was a UBI and the whole transfer would end up consolidating with a few landlords.
Really, independent of the unlikely characterization of housing supply curve in this subthread, UBI makes more sense tied to a progressive income tax without preferential treatment of capital income than to an LVT.
So the "alternative" you propose is actually what a UBI is by definition.
I'm totally stealing that line.
The larger point is that not only is the idea of a UBI decent and moral, because nobody should worry about being homeless or starving in a rich society, but because its much cheaper the the alternative! Only someone completely blinded by ideology (or somehow profiting off of the existing system) would argue that its better to spend $50,000 dollars a year per homeless person to manage shelters and run a bureaucracy if simply giving that homeless person $25,000 a year and achieves a better overall result.
But it isn't. A fifth of the UK working age population, for example, is neither registered as unemployed or earning money. Most of them aren't homeless, or entitled to disability benefits and aren't registered as unemployed because for whatever reason they don't need the money. All of them would be eligible for basic income.
You can afford to provide much better support for homeless people (many of whose bigger problems cannot be addressed simply by providing them with a regular income) if your budget isn't being stretched by the need to subsidise the perceived basic needs of huge numbers of content people that aren't actually interested in claiming subsidies.
And don't forget that, after all win the minimum, that's the new zero.
While there's no denying that capitalism can be ruthless and unrepentant, and what we have for capitalism currently actually is that, calling the progress of capitalism "ruthless" and "unrepentant" is just as loaded as calling UBI communism/socialism/etc, and leads to needlessly heated debates and ideological headbutting. It fails to convince anyone of anything.
Even if capitalism isn't ruthless and unrepentant, the value of human labor goes down, and isn't necessarily undermined, when capitalism seeks efficiency. There is no strict requirement that capitalism be ruthless and unrepentant—those are, in fact, human traits that are impossible to apply to the unthinking and unfeeling system that is capitalism.
When capitalism replaces human labor with machines, it isn't to undermine the value of human labor, it's to be more efficient. Ultimately, the result is the same, as you describe: humans are unable to exploit their labor for even basic living. But calling out capitalism as some kind of evil hydra that explicitly sets out to destroy the lives and livelihood of the working class is unproductive. That is an unfortunate side effect of capitalism, and of capitalism gaining increased prominence during an age when human labor itself had high intrinsic value but was also relatively abundant. It is a side effect which must be addressed.
I find it much more effective to couch UBI in terms of the end result of capitalism: it makes no sense for a capitalistic system to use relatively inefficient humans to do work that machines can do faster and cheaper. To ensure and give inefficient humans jobs that capitalism could otherwise find ways to do sounds more like a socialist makework ideal than UBI does. It is actually in capitalism's best interest to pay people to stay out the areas where they can not perform tasks as well as machines can. This frees up people to find other avenues of contribution, perhaps finding further efficiencies, without using up all their time and energy leveraging their faculties purely to stay alive.
Addendum. There seems to be a contradiction in the message, on the one hand people in developed economies make too much money (traded in time for more money to buy things they don't need nor actually want -they claim) but at the same time it's "unfair" they make 3-times what a comparable Bolivian makes (but cut our hours by two thirds) So it kind of reads as if they'd like to turn Bolivians into a consumerist society too, but they kind of trash consumerism ("neither need nor want").
As for open borders? Probably not going to happen until almost everyone else also has open borders and UBI (i.e. it's a chicken & egg problem). Otherwise the first nations to have both will probably face immigration overload and attract all the wrong kinds of people.
"Oh no, things are gonna get a lot worse."
Most vehemently against UBI are the trade unions. Their existence depends on unemployment being nasty ordeal. If unemployment was OKish, employees would vote with their feet. No unions needed. Next worst is McJobs companies.
Minimum wage making unemployment more prevalent and the employed more comfortable is furthering trade union goals like nothing else. These ideas may look the same, but they are completely opposed.
"how, for example, can we can open all the borders without eventually replacing countries with a global government?"
Nobody can, nor should. Currently somewhat open borders and somewhat good social security is already causing big problems in my country. The easy solution would be UBI for citizens, easy visas for everybody else. Everybody would be better off, except for the people who migrate only to get government benefits. Companies could hire foreign workforce easy, total incoming numbers would stay relatively low, people actually coming from war zones and escaping bullets would find safety.
The immigration fear mongers are against this, because solving this problem would end the justification for their existence. Also the left are against this, because they could not run around calling people "fascist" anymore. And the do-gooders would implode, as small numbers of poor third world citizens would keep on being poor, but now they would do it here! It's so nice to have them out of sight.
Huh. I'll poll my union friends. This would surprise me.
(FWIW, apropos of nothing, union halls are temp agencies with collective bargaining.)
"The immigration fear mongers are against this..."
I assume nowadays economic immigrants mostly want to make their fortune and then go home to retire. I read a study that tracked immigration to/from Puerto Rico. Many (the majority) return home or plan to. Asking all my immigrate coworkers, I get mostly the same answers.
About the nativists: hater's are gonna hate. Just route around them.
Currently in Finland if you can ~800e/month from the government if you get asylum. That's not "rich", but it's lot better than most things available in Iraq right now.
The fear mongers (perussuomalaiset) won the last election and got to the government. Their performance controlling the situation has been very lackluster so far.
By the same reasoning, you wouldn't like to see a UBI because then you couldn't bash unions or McJobs anymore.
Sometimes when people say they want to see something go away, they mean it.
The crux here is that I'm a person. Union member is a person too, many of them probably would genuinely like UBI. As group they would probably not admit they don't like it. But organizations tend follow the incentives of the organization more than they follow opinions of the members.
Our politicians are clowns, but they are our clowns. And they care about us lot more than EU clowns or U.S. clowns. So far it looks like bigger countries tend to have less efficient and more corrupt governments. If we make some kind of world government, that might turn incredibly inefficient and corrupt. And now you have absolutely nowhere to run to.
If you are US citizen, you can small tasting of your new world order by voting in the next election like some random person over the internet tells you. Are you willing to do that?
I'm thinking of certain types of R&D, medicine, and certain kinds of leadership roles.
In the near term, there are some obvious moves. The $15 minimum wage. The 8 hour day and 40 hour week. (That means everybody below the 1% gets paid time and a half for overtime, and wage theft is a crime.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...
Transformed me from an Eeyore into an unrepentant optimist.
https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc - "RSA Animate: Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us"
Short version: internal motivation is much stronger than external motivation.
The word is "colonialism" and it was moderately successful. But lets not kid ourselves - there were lots of abuses and it was very far from the utopia that I think you wish for.
Due to nationalism and a desire to oppress their neighbors, most people would oppose this even if it makes their current vicinity better. Unfortunately this leaves the oppressed locals with no place to go.
The idea behind Basic Income is to remove government intervention in the economy. Coupled with a flat tax, it massively reduces government overhead and bureaucracy, and leaves government to it's main role as the arbiter of society.
Governments' main role is to enforce the rules a society is based upon via the social contract. Collect taxes, enforce laws, and invest in the unprofitable but necessary foundations of civilization (infrastructure, healthcare, research, conservation, etc.)
In societies, as in design, less is often more. The more lifelong government bureaucrats we create, the more perverse incentives exist for them to parasitize the government for their own gains.
So why do we need to legislate for minimum work hours if we have a sufficient BI? And in what fictional universe does open borders make sense?
Human beings are competitive, and we form tribes to compete against one another. This is healthy, and leads to great achievements when properly channeled. The Cold War, for example, caused an era of unprecedented technological innovation. As we enter the post-war era, we already see the downfalls of globalization. When there is no need to compete, decadence sets in. The rich hoard money, and governments refuse to invest in their people's future in the form of infrastructure, research, etc.
We need borders, and we need a competitive immigration system that behaves like a sports team manager who is constantly on the lookout to poach talented individuals from competitors.
Competition is the quintessential human trait which has brought us to where we are today. Setting it aside has always lead to decadence and downfall.
That's not to defend the article, of course.
