this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Fundamentally money is a way of allocating limited resources. As long as there remains greed and limited resources, there need to be such limits. All anti-capitalist campaigners seem to rightly agree that human greed is a constant factor, so it would be crazy to forget it here.
If you give out money the people who own stuff (rich people) will just increase prices and take all that money.
If you print £100 and give it to every person, then yes. But if you tax every person with progressive taxation so that the poor pay little or no tax, and then give everyone £100 using the proceeds, no, because you are changing the distribution of resource-allocation-units between the people who had the most and the least of them previously.
Even in the former example the inflation hits the billionaire harder than the worker. For example if we all got a trillion dollars it wouldn't really matter that Elon has a trillion and a half. Scale that same principle down and UBI is good for the workers.
The "price increases" side of inflation harms the people that hold money.
Billionaires do hold more than poor people, but they still mostly don't hold any. It's normally the high-middle class and the poorest fraction of the rich that are hit the most here. You need proper taxation to reach the billionaires.
I disagree that inflation hits billionaires harder, they invest their money in the stock market which outpaces the rate of inflation Year over Year. Meanwhile, your total buying power drops tremendously because of inflation’s increase each year. If most of your money isn’t in the stock market then the worth of your money continues to be less. If you don’t get a wage increase at your job, then you’re making less money each year rather than the same amount as well.
I do agree that UBI is good for workers though, mainly because it also puts power back in the hands of workers since they become not dependent on their employers to survive. Workers instead would be coming into work because they want to thrive.
I didn't say all inflation hits billionaires harder. Just inflation from UBI. Inflation from stock growth hits workers harder, and that's why we need wage growth and UBI growth to outperform stock growth.
So, why don't they do just increase all the prices now?
Because people can't afford it?
Increasing the money supply does lead to inflation, but it's not as simple as you make it seem. It's worth pointing out that generally people intend UBI to redistribute money rather than add to the current supply. If necessary, there's no reason that you can't have stronger price regulation for any destabilized industry.
Because even if there is inflation, that doesn't mean prices go up evenly. For example, staple foods are fairly insulated from inflation because of steady demand and low barriers to entry. If it seems noticeably profitable, a lot of people can start producing it and undercutting each other. Industry collusion is very hard to achieve the more players there are that can sabotage the group.
If UBI covers only basic needs (implied by the B) that are purchased at steady amounts regardless, that opens up the lower classes to a lot more optional spending. So you would probably see the most price increases on things that are currently bought by the upper middle class. Expensive hobbies, premium brands of things with cheaper alternatives, and services in general would probably become more expensive from induced demand.
I agree and my reply was a bit short and incomplete. I'm mostly worried about things like housing and infrastructure. Very expensive and mostly privatized. With that also access to the workers and companies that can actually build stuff.
Yeah, I'm not sure how those would be affected overall. Housing unfortunately has been going up in price quickly for a long time despite largely stagnant wages. But I expect having a reliable stream of income would be a significant benefit for low income people to be able to afford at least what they would have otherwise. It's an area that really warrants more attention regardless of whether UBI is implemented.
Those people should be taxed more really. Personally, I believe every dollar over $1 billion should be taxed at 90+%. I would set the threshold for scaling those tax brackets much lower than that though.
Billionaires should be banned from using their stocks as collateral for loans as well.
Definitely
Yes, but the free money that is given out is typically obtained by taking it from the people who own stuff.
That would be great but it's usually not the case (look at COVID, the banking crisis in 2008 etc). The money is not coming from the rich.