I’m not sure about any of this, which is why I’m starting the thread. I just want to throw some ideas around.
For a little while I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a social safety net that’s so robust that essentially everyone can afford and receive the basic necessities for life (food, shelter, and health care), indefinitely, combined with the elimination of standards like minimum wage, overtime, and other regulations meant to protect workers.
The idea behind linking these two ideas, I believe, is to provide a base-level of protection for all workers with the social safety net (whether it’s UBI plus UHC or some other combination) such that they have the ability to quit shitty jobs without risking losing their family’s home, survival needs, and health care, along with a very free market to encourage competition and innovation without being encumbered by regulation. It doesn’t necessarily mean all regulations go out the window – I would tend to think that safety regulations probably should still be required, as well as laws against employment discrimination per the Civil Rights Act and related anti-discrimination laws. But this would eliminate the need for minimum wage and other compensation regulations, as well as regulations that make it hard for employees to fire workers that aren’t delivering. Further, it would allow workers to take more risks, like starting businesses and passion projects, that they can’t take in the current environment because the loss of their day job could mean a loss of health care, home, and basic needs for their families.
So those are some of the positives.
Some drawbacks I can think of:
Decreased incentive to work – if work isn’t needed for basic survival and to keep shelter over one’s head, as well as to get care for sick family members, some people might choose not to work. This might not always be a drawback, though – they might contribute in other ways, with volunteer work or similar.
Greatly increased incentive for employers to hire and mistreat undocumented immigrants – with no regulations for wages, compensation, and the like, their livelihoods will be at the whim of the employers, who can treat them like utter shit (or at least only slightly better than the country from which they came) and they’ll have very little recourse.
I’m sure there are others.
Also, am I correct in thinking that this is at least somewhat close to the Scandinavian economic model?