Hey @dwinblood, thanks for commenting!
If you were forced to do it by a government or group then it has nothing to do with compassion since there was not a choice.
I absolutely, whole-heartedly, 100% agree with you here.
I also agree a minimum wage backed by government decree is not the answer and only makes things worse (side note: Jefrey Tucker at PorcFest recently quoted from a very old economics textbook which basically described the minimum wage as a eugenics program. Sickening.)
a Universal Basic Income is essentially a minimum wage
Have you done some research on the concept to come to that conclusion or is that your initial understanding of it? I've come to understand it as a universal income, meaning everyone gets it regardless of their status, their job, etc. The idea that everyone needs to work in order to survive made sense before we started automating things to the point of exponentially increasing our productivity. From my perspective, much of the value humans create today is extracted by fractional reserve lending banksters and other crony activities designed by criminals in government. Value exists all around us, it's just being stollen.
Take a look at the Steem rich list. If they so desired and if the market cap of STEEM went into the 10's or 100's of billions of dollars, they could Vest STEEM into Steem Power for many, many people. In essence, that's what @dantheman, @ned and the founders of Steem do when they sign up new accounts. If the value was there, the power down nature of Steem could provide weekly payments of value to a lot of people. That, to me, is an amazing thing.
I hadn't come to any conclusions on UBI which is why I asked if everyone got it regardless of whether they had a job or not. Mainly because my $7.50/hr vs $15.01/hr person example... if you had a UBI of $6/hr which people CAN survive on but they can't eat great and such... can probably even do less. I guarantee you welfare/food stamps pays way more than people actually need. Most groceries I've ever been able to buy for my family have been when I qualified for food stamps. We ate like kings in our opinion. :) I haven't qualified for a long time and spend less than half what food stamps gave me. So if the UBI is to make sure people can survive it would need to be realistic. So let's say it was $6/hr as a hypothetical... would that mean the person that was making $6/hr would get the $6/hr UBI + if they had a job their $7.50/hr and the other person would be getting $6/hr + $15.01/hr?
I think it would change the labor market because employers would have to be more competitive when hiring (since not everyone had to work). There are a lot of valid concerns about inflation or even hyperinflation, but from my perspective, we'd already be seeing hyper inflation right now given the $8T+ which has been created out of nothing over the last 8 years or so. The reason we aren't, I think, is because of incredible productivity we have due to technology. We should probably be seeing $8T+ in deflation right now, but the FED just prints away (to the benefit of their bankster cronies who see the money first) which essentially steals from the rest of us.
If you want to know more, I'd recommend following those Facebook groups for a few months. They post a lot of really interesting articles from some very smart people on the topic. Inflation is a possibility, but there are also other offsets which might prevent that from happening.