I don't want employment, and hell no I definitely don't want full employment, just the opposite. I want us as a species to transition to a leisure society with the ick automated away, and the only jobs humans do being ones humans would love to do for the sheer fun of it.
Because a minimum wage has a loophole for "not employed at all", it isn't good enough. A Basic Income has no such loophole, and will allow poor people to reject awful jobs, forcing them to be automated.
I'm curious about this. In your ideal above, how would one go about pursuing their dreams without an ability to earn excess capital through labor?
For example, my goal is to have a nice house on 50-100 acres. I also really enjoy jet skiing and boating with my family - especially from a nice lakefront rental with a private dock.
I can't fathom how I would pursue those goals in a 'leisure society'... Or as a prole would I be expected to just accept my assigned housing, only use public transportation, and put my name in an annual lottery for one of the state run vacation compounds?
An approach I've considered is, that the living allocation by default is just comfortable. You'd be able to get allocated a city apartment or a rural house. But this is coupled to a delegation based "liquid" direct world democracy where you can either direct your surplus yourself, or delegate it to someone (or some organization). And recursively they can delegate it too.
So suppose you were Elon Musk and you said, I want to build a colony on Mars, you'd probably be able to draw the interest of large delegating entities who would grant resource priority to the program so it could make rockets, and other entities would have projects that needed launching, and so forth.
Or compare a smaller project, if you were a marine biologist and you wanted to equip a boat and go study penguins, there would be some delegating entity that would care about penguins, and you'd get your boat.
Perhaps even if you just wanted a particularly beautiful house, you'd be able to draw enough aesthetes to your cause.
But if you were just a jerk who wanted a mansion, well, probably not.
[Edit: for clarity, you could conceptualize this system as something like crowdfunding, except global, recursively delegated, and directing resources directly instead of money.]
So that doesn't really answer any of the scenarios I posed. You do manage to imply that I'm a jerk for wanting a nicer house/vacation/recreational vehicle than I'm allocated by the state, so that tells me something...
Sounds to me like if I wanted to buy a jet-ski in your world, I'd have to find a bunch of people to 'delegate' their 'surplus' to me. Perhaps I could perform some function for them in return? Say, that sounds a lot like labor... So I could work for money. Got it.
In a total leisure society, how do we pay for Basic Income? Where does the government get the money to give out to everyone?
I agree with you. But I think its not about Basic Income, but the idea of Basic Utility/Survival where we can supply basic needs for free, via automation etc.
> Where does the government get the money to give out to everyone?
The exact same place they get it right now - they pull it out of thin air by fiat. (involving a quasi-government agency ("the fed") as a proxy is optional) Money hasn't been zero sum up since the gold standard.
Governments already define most aspects of money, and they can change it as needed, such as when Nixon declared that the dollar was no longer convertible to gold.
You can't comment like this here, regardless of how wrong or ignorant another commenter seems. We ban accounts that do personal attacks. Please re-read the guidelines and post only comments that are civil and substantive.
If you think that's "retarded", I suggest studying more macroeconomics and the history of the dollar. I suspect money doesn't work they way you think it does.
Because a minimum wage has a loophole for "not employed at all", it isn't good enough. A Basic Income has no such loophole, and will allow poor people to reject awful jobs, forcing them to be automated.