The problem with UBI versus, let's say, single payer, is that buyers compete and therefore drive up price. In short they "defect" from the price the other buyers pay.
Think about patio and his posts in the past about increasing your rates. That's how it happens.
When you have insurance, then the buyer and seller can join forces to raise prices - that's called a moral hazard.
buyers competing is OK, though, right? I was under the impression that the justification for UBI was to attack the ability to pay, which some people lack, rather than the outcome of what they pay for.
The "problem" that UBI has vs single payer is that it is not creating a command economy, but leveling the playing field in a capitalist one. If you want a single payer, you don't want a UBI, you want communism. If you want UBI, you are OK with market forces, but are using a single lever to attempt to correct for a market failure in the most "libertarian" way possible.
The only way single payer really succeeds is if you curtail consumer choice in order to achieve efficiency in what you buy - the single payer doesn't understand all the possibilities in the market. This is maybe a reasonable thing to do in sub-markets, like prescription medication, but is not such a great idea if you do it to the entire market.
If all buyers buy the same thing naturally, the price will go up, yes, but in the long run, production should also go up. If you just put a price control on it, there will always be a short supply, and too much unmet demand, even if the price for those who do manage to get the good is a great deal.
Communism is more than just "to everyone according to his need". It is also "from everyone according to his ability." And it talks about collective ownership of the means of production, and other stuff. To a great extent, the public stock market is collective ownership of corporations, which is far better than what Marx had in mind.
BUT
This is not about labels. This is about designing systems that work, vs systems that have major issues.
The major issue with UBI is inflation. There is no way around it. Everyone gets X every day. This X is spent into the economy, primarily on necessities. They are not sensitive to price increases because X is indexed to inflation, otherwise what's the point?
So, stores raise prices and people go ahead and pay anyway. And so every sector competes with every other to raise prices before the other sector takes more of the UBI money than they do.
It is a moral hazard.
Now, with single payer systems, the doctor has a choice: accept Medicare, with the prices it offers, or not. It's attractive to accept Medicare because you get a lot of patients who would otherwise not pay you.
This DOES NOT MEAN the consumer can't choose the doctor, school, or anything else. It just means there is collective bargaining for prices.
And btw you benefit from this all the time. Look at Amazon squeezing publishers - stories on HN all the time about this. Or Apple's App Store having rules for developers. Or Google's rules for web publishers, making them make responsive sites. And so on.
Libertarians think "the government" is just one entity. But every organization has a management structure. Eventually we may have decentralized protocols like scuttlebutt etc. that change this paradigm. But for now, we have organizations all over the place and when most consumers are on Facebook, etc. they do in fact squeeze publishers.
I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, but, IMO UBI is not a moral hazard generator. Just because you get the money doesn't incentivize you to not care about prices. It may make you less sensitive to prices, but it will need to be budgeted nonetheless. If it were infinite UBI, then yes, a free source of infinite money would create a situation where buyers are shielded from rising prices and thus don't care about them.
UBI is NOT insurance, though, and so it is difficult to argue that a limited income, even if free, creates a moral hazard that would truly cause people to no longer budget for things, any more than a salary makes you price insensitive. The quantity of the UBI seems to be the relevant factor, I guess.
Think about patio and his posts in the past about increasing your rates. That's how it happens.
When you have insurance, then the buyer and seller can join forces to raise prices - that's called a moral hazard.