Providing the "needs" vs money to buy the needs would result in just as much inflation. Those goods and services still need to be paid for, even if it's the government paying for them.
Money is just the simplest way to give assistance because it's fungible. Fewer rules to make, less administrative overhead, extremely flexible, responsive to changes in the market.
If the government built giant housing blocks, so that anyone could have a basic apartment, how would that lead to inflation in the housing market? If anything the abundance of supply would dramatically deflate the costs.
Note that I'm talking about orders of magnitude more of construction than current public housing projects.
> how would that lead to inflation in the housing market?
If the government buys up all the contractors’ labour, that increases their prices for everyone else. At the same time, if the cash flow consumers once directed to housing is now freed for e.g. whoever is buying 10+ cartons of eggs at Wegman’s, that too drives inflation.
Good policies can be good without dismissing their drawbacks.
1. No reason why contractors have to be the only laborers. You could pay regular people to build them, as was done in the Depression.
2. This would potentially lead to inflation in the construction market, not the housing market as a whole.
3. Even then, the increased amount of work would likely increase the labor pool.
4. And any of these effects would probably be temporary, as it's not like the housing units would need to be reconstructed yearly.
But honestly, this whole debate is entirely uninteresting to me and was only an offhand comment in my original comment. Shame that no one seems interested in the artistic part, only the drab economic one.
The government doesn't do anything. It is the people that do. If the poor people all choose to live off UBI then who will be building these giant housing blocks since it isn't the rich people that build housing?
1. You can pay people to build them, as was done in the Great Depression.
2. UBI does not exclude the ability of people to work for money. If workers wanted to earn money on top of the UBI, presumably they would do so.
3. The number of workers required to build housing is also a tiny fraction of the number of people that can be housed in said building.
4. Furthermore, the question here is between UBI and giving "basic resources." So presumably if the government is going to spend money on UBI, they could spend that money on just directly building stuff. (Which makes more sense to me.)
Housing is a bit different because it's so supply-constrained, so I do think that building social housing would have a huge positive impact. Other supply-constrained goods and services may be similar, but I don't think many are as obvious as housing. Maybe doctors?
Various demand-side subsidies seem roughly as likely to raise prices, whether that's giving money to consumers or buying the goods on their behalf.
Money is just the simplest way to give assistance because it's fungible. Fewer rules to make, less administrative overhead, extremely flexible, responsive to changes in the market.