Interest rates are a matter off currency and supply and demand. The government both manipulates markets (food, precious metals, oil) through the use of subsidy and control of imports and exports (regionally and globally). For example, exportation of US crude oil is illegal, which is a price control on the market. Meat, dairy and crops are regionally price controlled and simulated through subsidy. Lastly, currency manipulation in the form of the federal funds rate and arbitrarily controlled currency inflation is a power vested to government and the Federal Reserve because US Dollars are fiat (not stable money). Without a doubt government plays the biggest hand in weighing economies down, with no culpability, accountability or moral grounds for doing so. Universal wage is a euphemism for mandated salary, worse net-economic effect than the price control of minimum wage labor.

Here is a critically important study to view on the issue:
"In 2007, nominal GDP was $14 trillion. Had regulation remained at its 1949 level, current GDP would have been about $25 trillion, an increase of $11 trillion. With about 140 million households and 300 million people, an annual loss of $11 trillion converts to $78,600 per household and $36,700 per person. Another way to put it, perhaps a little too dramatically, is that each page of federal regulation added since 1949 today costs the economy roughly $82.1 million in foregone output per year."