Universal Basic Income will never work because it doesn’t implement game theory properly. People who say that paying everyone a living wage wouldn’t cause inflation simply do not understand that every landlord would jack up their prices, all food and other essentials would manufacture fake scarcity to keep profits up, and no difficult, awful jobs would be done consistently enough for society to function. It really pissed me off when Kurzgesagt covered this topic and handwaved that no inflation would occur with a MBI system, and I heard the same thing on reddit all the time. Yes, it would. Competition doesn’t just leave human nature because you give people some money to live on.

What we really need if we want to fix the Great Depression 2.0 are pragmatic public services. The government needs to heavily fund new housing to increase supply (implicitly dropping prices), and heavily remove laws that force corporations to prioritize shortsighted shareholder profits over long-term stability, so people have more leverage when negotiating their own salaries. Ultimately I do not think these are problems that can be solved with more government oversight, and while capitalism is not a perfect system, the logic of it at least works better than communism. Communism failed faster and harder than capitalism for a reason, it’s not the cure-all people online seem to think it is.