If you didn't have to work for money, what would you do?
Would you spend more time with your kids? Would you take your parents out of the nursing home and care for them yourself? Would you spend more time with your signifiant other?
Would you return to music or painting, which you abandoned when you had to enter the "real world" and earn a living? Would you go back to school, to pursue the academic interests you earlier had to set aside to focus on something that had good job prospects? Would you volunteer more often, or get politically involved trying to fix issues you don't have time to worry about right now?
Would you exercise more, and play sports more often? Would you spend more time cooking, and cut back on prepared, unhealthy foods? Would you sleep seven hours a day, instead of five?
Would you quit your job and start the company that you always wanted to, and steer it in the direction you wanted, working with the people that you wanted to, without thinking twice about what potential investors might think? Would you move into the career that you always dreamed of as a kid, but that just didn't pay enough? Would you take more risks? Would you worry less about failure, and work harder on those things that you are passionate about?
Or would you just laze around on the couch in your cramped apartment watching TV and eating ice-cream all day?
Of course, it must be this last option, because what else would anyone ever do if they had the choice not to work? Of course, without the fear of abject deprivation as a motivator, no one would ever do any work, and no one ever has.
Discipline and pressure are not the only ways to prevent laziness (there are also passion, curiosity, and imagination), and the threat of deprivation is not the only way (and is probably not the best way) to teach discipline.
The problem here is what will happen if basic income means that costs for things like garbage collection start to explode.
People think that company profits on a per-employee basis are something like a factor 10. In practice, for the best companies in existence (think google) it's a factor of 3 or so. For most companies it's much lower 10% would be a lot (hiring is already very expensive, just try it). This number is called efficiency of the economy and it's an upper bound on how much more money you can give any significant group of people (assuming labor costs dominate, which is currently true). Of course you could give them more by law, but it would simply result in massive price hikes for everything until we're back in the current situation.
Those people are already not working. So, instead of spending more on officials and offices and paperwork determining if they can have welfare or not, let's just give them the money directly.
If the cost of covering everyone is less than or equal to the current cost, why not?
BI is supposed to cover food and simple housing, people that want to travel, have a large house, or have hobbies will probably need at least part-time jobs to cover that, their incomes will be taxed.
The problem is getting over the idea that some people would be freeloaders, but again, if the total cost is less than the current cost of welfare, it's in our best interests to switch.
I'm not certain that it will work or that it is a good idea, but the counter-arguments seem to be 1. people irritated that they'd be forced to pay for the lazy and would rather lazy people have a shitty life than have less welfare expenses for the state, 2. people who assert without a scientific study that the majority of other people in absence of a job wish to do nothing but watch TV all day every day, and 3. people who just flat-out construct strawman arguments about lazy people having parties all day every day at the expense of the state.
Crappy jobs should be made less crappy, or pay enough that a reasonable person with options would choose to do it. All the comfort we get from people who have to do bad jobs or starve, feel unfairly gained.
If you didn't have to work for money, what would you do?
Would you spend more time with your kids? Would you take your parents out of the nursing home and care for them yourself? Would you spend more time with your signifiant other?
Would you return to music or painting, which you abandoned when you had to enter the "real world" and earn a living? Would you go back to school, to pursue the academic interests you earlier had to set aside to focus on something that had good job prospects? Would you volunteer more often, or get politically involved trying to fix issues you don't have time to worry about right now?
Would you exercise more, and play sports more often? Would you spend more time cooking, and cut back on prepared, unhealthy foods? Would you sleep seven hours a day, instead of five?
Would you quit your job and start the company that you always wanted to, and steer it in the direction you wanted, working with the people that you wanted to, without thinking twice about what potential investors might think? Would you move into the career that you always dreamed of as a kid, but that just didn't pay enough? Would you take more risks? Would you worry less about failure, and work harder on those things that you are passionate about?
Or would you just laze around on the couch in your cramped apartment watching TV and eating ice-cream all day?
Of course, it must be this last option, because what else would anyone ever do if they had the choice not to work? Of course, without the fear of abject deprivation as a motivator, no one would ever do any work, and no one ever has.