I'm going to try to illustrate my point differently.

You keep saying that businesses, in effect, ought to be the sole arbitrator of what the value of labor is, and any infringement on that ability somehow limits people's options and that said limitation is more exploitative than whatever the business is doing.

You've gone further to say that it would be better for someone to be trapped in poverty working some dead-end job that pays only the absolute minimum to get any worker, with no possible avenue out via education or entrepreneurship or whatever, than to not have access to any job at all.

This system is deeply flawed in that it allows for the potential value of a person to be "zero", in that they cannot access base necessities of life (shelter, food, water, healthcare, etc) much less the "luxuries" of equity like education.

I suggest what if the system was flipped? What if the population got to decide what was best for itself, instead of businesses. Instead of businesses setting the sole value of slices of a human life (which they've done in the past and has led to things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), we define an absolute minimum value of life by providing the base necessities (shelter, food, water, healthcare, education). We, as a society, agree on roughly the things that everyone should have access to, and provide those things. We already do this in part through public education, which even in some cases provides the "food" and "shelter" components. (This is obviously limited by the rest of the student's socioeconomic circumstances, but the point remains: this is not a foreign concept in US thinking.)

If citizens had access to this base standard, it (a) prevents the problem of human life being valued at "zero" and having such a thing as a poverty cycle, (b) removes the burden of healthcare from businesses' pocketbooks, which will equalize the playing-field between gigantic corporations and small-town businesses, and (c) give a lot more flexibility to the population in the choices they can make.

To this last point: In my school district, there was a group of anonymous donors ~20 years ago who assembled a fund that would pay for the college education of any student who graduated from that district, with some minimum required GPA. In effect, free college, if you make it through the public school system. (The assumed motivations of these corporate donors being to increase the highly-educated labor pool with ties to the region, that they could then hire from.) We had a graduation rate of less than 50%, in part because most of the families of the students were so poor that they absolutely needed the added income of the student to stay afloat--and they couldn't work a job and manage school at the same time. So they dropped out, and merrily became part of the poverty cycle. UBI, or something like it, would have prevented that.

As I said before, we have systems like this in place already: public education is a powerful equalizer. Still deeply flawed, certainly, but a fine step in the right direction, and it benefits the whole population.

You (rightly) say these things have costs, and you're absolutely correct--but it's a fallacy to think that we don't have the resources to fix it. There's dozens of political platforms with plans to fund UBI and Universal Healthcare endeavors. Beyond that, even just mild increases in taxes on the ultra-wealthy would fund plenty of these endeavors. Hell, two days ago ProPublica dropped a report about how the mega-rich can legally avoid taxes on an insane portion of their wealth, and how much more weight the rest of Americans (including those in the poverty cycle) have to then carry [0].

I find framing many of these questions in terms of "is it in the population's best interest?" helps illuminate flaws in various systems. For example, is it in the population's best interest for private insurance companies to control access to healthcare? What if all the money that flowed to insurance executives instead went into funding additional research? Is it in the population's best interest for energy companies to gain access to frakking permits via lobbying? Would investment in new nuclear power systems be more beneficial in terms of environmental impact and energy production?

The attitude that businesses and their accompanying markets somehow are the best vehicle to approach and address these issues, to me, is missing the forest for the trees.

[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...