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0 pointsmises7y ago0 comments

> Why don't rents consume all the economic growth without UBI?

They sort of do (at least in some cases; see San Francisco, New York, tons of other big cities).

> that is just as important to correct even if we don't adopt UBI. It's not, in any way, an argument against UBI.

The fact that the we need to address it doesn't mean we easily can. And doesn't mean that just blindly doing it is justified, just because there shouldn't be such a problem.

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dragonwriter7y ago· 2 in thread

> The fact that the we need to address it doesn't mean we easily can.

The mechanism for dealing with an essential service that, left to private industry with only normal consumer protection regulation, is difficult to prevent becoming a rent-extracting monopoly or oligopoly is well-established—you make the service a utility, either privately owned but publicly regulated for price and service requirements, or publicly owned. This isn't a deep mystery.

Now, most of the people that cry “housing is already oligopolistic and would extract rents defeating any UBI” as an excuse for opposing UBI evidently either don't actually believe that market condition really exists or want to preserve it in the absence of UBI even though it has the same impact on income gains without UBI as they complain it would with UBI, but the mechanism for addressing it is obvious and, if it really exists, essential even in the absence of UBI.

misesOP7y ago

> you make the service a utility

This is just a silly idea for housing. Power, water, etc. involves one set of infrastructure that runs across public and private land. It is very difficult to become a utility because of the insane investment required. Because almost no one can compete, it is regulated to prevent the otherwise-inevitable monopoly. Land is in no way the same; it's literally everywhere and many people own it.

Better solution? According to a professor of economics I talked to, it's to create tech hubs in other cities (at least for San Francisco; finance for NY, etc.).

dragonwriter7y ago

> Power, water, etc. involves one set of infrastructure that runs across public and private land.

Yes, that's the reason that they naturally tend to monopoly that is resistant to correction, but it is the fact that they tend that way, and not the reason for that tendency, that justified treatment as a utility.

> Land is in no way the same; it's literally everywhere and many people own it.

Are you arguing that residential rentals do not, in fact, either in general or in specific locales, tend to difficult to correct monopoly? If so, you aren't arguing against my point, which I'll remind you is merely that it doesn't matter if this is true in terms of UBI; if it is true, it is a problem of exactly the same dimension without UBI as with UBI, and thus irrelevant to the debate over UBI, and if it is false, then it's clearly irrelevant to anything.

> Better solution? According to a professor of economics I talked to, it's to create tech hubs in other cities (at least for San Francisco; finance for NY, etc.).

Well, not any kind of solution if you are an academic economist with no concern for pragmatics. Virtually every metro area of notsble size that isn't NY or SF had been trying to do that for a long time. Just choosing a policy result like that isn't a real-world solution, a real-world solution involved a policy action that can reasonably be expected to produce the desired result.

Also, either (1) local housing markets don't tend to monopoly, and this isn't needed, or (2) they do, and this just extends the time slightly before a successful firm in one market diversified into and also monopolizes other markets until you have the same problem nationally that you had in the local markets you tried to provide alternatives to. So, even if you had a mechanism to acheive what is sought as the solution, it wouldn't be a solution.

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