Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.

This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.

But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.

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triceratops 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords

Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.

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autoexec 11 hours ago | parent [-]

There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.

	▲	triceratops 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		How would they do that if housing is plentiful?
	▲	Spooky23 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much. These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.

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upboundspiral 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.

Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?

	▲	TurdF3rguson 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Other countries? Asia seems to be able to make a living off of rice farming, and their secret is not going into debt investing in $1M harvesters.

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9rx 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market

Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.

The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.