This is one of the best arguments for UBI. Imagine how much humanity would innovate in science, open source and other public gift economies if everyone didn’t have to worry how they will eat and pay rent next month.
How about reducing the generally accepted working hours to something like 24 hrs/week? 40 is pretty arbitrary so we could arbitrarily set a lower number. That would free up a lot of creativity.
The argument you are making assumes two things that strike me as highly implausible:
(1) That enough people would use their new free time to innovate instead of just watching TV or playing World of Warcraft or something like that.
(2) That enough people would still choose to do the unpleasant but necessary tasks that provide the resources needed for everyone to eat, have housing, etc. Not to mention all the other stuff people seem to want.
Right now a fairly tight circle of people decide for others how to spend vast amounts of time. It's not even very efficient as many jobs carry bullshit hours requirements. So after increasing free time by a large amount, a very small number of people start choosing different areas to innovate in, it still ends up as a large growth area for innovation, or social interaction, or whatever humans value individually instead of what old line accounting values.
I don't dispute that our current system is inefficient. But the proposed change under discussion (universal basic income) does not just mean "increasing free time by a large amount" while keeping everything else the same. It means increasing free time by a large amount while removing the need for anyone to do productive work. It's the latter that I see as problematic, not the former.
What would a world where we did the former but not the latter look like? It would be something like everyone having to be, at least in some measure, an entrepreneur--everyone would be their own small business, having to figure out what product or service to sell to others in order to make a living, and having to decide for themselves what use of their time would best serve that goal. That might well, in the long run (i.e., after all the upheaval caused by people who were used to having someone else define their business objectives, now having to do it themselves, has died down), be a big improvement over what we have now. But the key incentive of having to make a living is still there.
I think you may be under appreciating the "basic" part of universal basic income, as well as the human drive to do better than their own baselines.
The "basic" part means that the level of income is generally set at an austere level. Think of living in the minimal existence of a monk. Some people would do fine with that, and would choose it, but the vast majority of people I believe would elect to work for more.
Humans over their history have always reached for more, including the most extremely wealthy, who basically have a capitalism granted equivalent of UBI, but significant numbers still choose to work.
> The "basic" part means that the level of income is generally set at an austere level.
And all history shows that that level increases over time to a point where "minimal existence" is enough luxury to be unsustainable. This is by no means the first time that the option of the state doling out basic necessities to everybody has been considered. The Romans had their bread and circuses. Today it would be food stamps and cable TV and Facebook and Twitter. Same difference.
How many is "plenty"? What percentage of people who have enough money not to do those things actually do them?
My sense is that that percentage is pretty low. Yes, there are people like pg or sama who continue to work and add value even though they don't have to, and I think that's an admirable thing to do. But I think there are many more people who, once they have enough wealth to not have to work, stop working for good and don't produce anything after that.
How many people contribute to open source, wikipedia and debate stuff online?
A lot of it produces ZERO economic returns. But the fallacy is that we need top-down institutions to move things forward. I would argue that we are better off abolishing intellectual property laws as well and allowing everyone to contribute to open source drugs the way they do in other sciences.
Watch these two videos:
Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us
Clay Shirky: Institutions vs Collaboration
We need more collaboration and less capitalistic competition.
I know firsthand the righteous indignation that anarcho capitalist libertarians have at “violence” being used to redistribute wealth.
But these same libertarians ignore all the coersion used on the other side. They seem to want people to be FORCED to work out of fear of losing food and housing. Some freedom for the masses - the freedom to work or starve.
And of course Property is a coercive institution just like government. It has to be enforced. So Disneyworld charges visitors entry fees and vendors rent and pays people to dress up like Mickeys and it’s top down and Libertarians are ok with that. Next door is a city that’s run democratically and what if they want to charge taxes and redistribute basic income, how is that any worse than Mickeys?
> the fallacy is that we need top-down institutions to move things forward
That might well be true. And it has nothing whatever to do with what I said. In fact, abolishing top-down institutions would, if anything, make it more difficult to have a scheme like universal basic income (the topic we're discussing here) at all.
> of course Property is a coercive institution just like government. It has to be enforced
Is the only thing preventing you from appropriating your neighbors' property the fear of enforcement?
Property rights are agreements. If it is a net gain for all parties to follow an agreement, they will follow it, even in the absence of coercive enforcement.
Property rights are agreements. If it is a net gain for all parties to follow an agreement, they will follow it, even in the absence of coercive enforcement.
The same can be said about the social contract. Is the only thing preventing you from running red lights the fear of enforcement?
For many people, yes. That's the only thing. And we violate property rights in many ways, like peeing in a forest that may be "owned" by someone. Or by using an idea that may be "owned" by someone.
Property rights become "States" if the organization is large enough.
Property rights are basically monopoly rights to exclude others, by force if necessary, from the use of a resource.
Sometimes this exclusion actively harms wealth creation. Especially if the resource is a public good.
> Is the only thing preventing you from running red lights the fear of enforcement?
This is a very telling question. Of course the answer is yes--if you qualify "running red lights" to mean "running red lights when it is clear that it is not going to cause any harm or violate anyone's property rights". For example, it's very late at night, it's an intersection with clear visibility in all directions, well lighted, and there is obviously no one else in sight. In such a case, yes, the only thing preventing me (and probably any reasonable person) from running the red light is fear of enforcement.
But of course that's because any reasonable person has the common sense to know that running a red light under circumstances where it will clearly violate no one's property rights and cause no one harm is not a crime; it's just a violation of an administrative rule, which in practice is used as a revenue source by localities, not to improve traffic safety.
And of course any reasonable person will not run a red light if it would risk causing harm or violating someone's property rights. But in that case, it is not because of fear of enforcement; it's because reasonable people understand that harming others or violating their property rights is a net loss for everybody, including them, so they have a good, rational reason not to do it and would behave the same even if it there were no enforcement.
> we violate property rights in many ways, like peeing in a forest that may be "owned" by someone
If this does no harm, how is it a violation of property rights?
> Or by using an idea that may be "owned" by someone.
Ideas are different because there is no such thing as exclusive "ownership" of ideas. Governments create "ownership" of ideas by making laws, but that doesn't make ideas the same as physical objects. If I take your car, I deprive you of it; we can't both have it. If I take your idea, you still have it; I can't deprive you of it. That is a key difference.
Across the of people I know from poor to wealthy, the percentage of people who do not work stays more or less the same in each bracket. Lazyness and motivation are pretty evenly distributed.
