You're free to believe that. You may very well be right. I don't know. For my own part, I think that they're unlikely to agree with you any time soon and likely to continue acting in what they see as their own interests.
No, I believe it's wrong that government policy and macroeconomics should be shifted away from the norm for the sake of one particular cultural identity. Instead, I want it shifted so that everyone can live how they think they ought to, without markets compelling anyone.
The unfairness is in Bob getting his unprofitable coal-mining job subsidized while Alice the starving artist can't even get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and of course Eve the Executive getting to exploit everyone else for her own profit.
I'm saying that lots of people don't want change, and telling them they must change is unlikely to be persuasive. In a democracy, this has practical consequences.
You're completely right. There are lots of these people. I simply do not believe that this number is large enough to significantly alter the analysis I have offered.
Am I generalizing? Of course I'm generalizing. There's no other way to meaningfully talk about tens of millions of unique, special, individual human beings.
Welcome to how many of us feel about wage-labor in the first place.
>In another, also very important sense, a basic income will destroy them. Not by death, but by unmaking who they are.
I need a good term for the extreme sense of entitlement inherent in yelling loudly, "Yes, definitely, give us a more brutal capitalism in which market forces override workers' preferences!" and then appending, "Except when doing so would violate my sense of identity".
Since when was imagined personal identity so sacred, let alone that the imagined personal identity of this particular demographic should be far more sacred than the imagined personal identities of everyone else put together?
What gives these people a right to live out their "identity" as blue-collar wage-workers, receiving high wages while rejecting unions at every opportunity, while people like me don't get to live out our "identities" as other things? Should we build custom-made bubble realities for everyone in which we can all pretend the world works exactly the way we want it to, and we never have to face hard truths about ourselves? Should society pay certain friends of mine to be artists, just because they self-identify as artists? Can I have a tenured academic job instead of a computer engineering job just because I "self-identify" with the values of academia more than with those of industry?
Jobs don't exist so anyone can actualize the little movie in their head about The Good Life. Jobs exist to make money for the employer, and arguably to exploit the worker. There are lots of useful things that need doing: infrastructure to repair, housing to build, communities to maintain. I support employing people to do those things: whoever wants to work should be handed the tools and told to show up on Monday because we're building a goddamn high-speed rail system like we should have done almost a decade ago.
I don't support building people's entire lives and livelihoods on lies.