Working a job you don't like is a leaser evil than mooching off of your neighbors. The level of entitlement required to argue the opposite is absolutely mind boggling.
How many people have to work full time to support one able-bodied layabout?
UBI may make sense in the event of technology-induced mass unemployment, but folks won't tolerate it otherwise. The incentives are simply and universally too bass-ackwards for society to function. They're backwards for the idle (who will find it easier to cut costs than work), for new graduates (who can split living costs with friends and delay entry into the workforce indefinitely), for workers (who would rather rent a trailer and chill than work 40 hours a week and live in the 'burbs and drive a new truck), and for politicians (who will shamelessly promise endless increases in benefits).
IMO UBI is a litmus test for basement dwellers, unserious utopians and plain-old first-order thinkers.
Working a job that makes the world a worse place because you need to survive is the issue.
It IS less evil to do nothing and be fed than to take up arms in a factory that produces produces that people want, but is poison (cigarettes, as an example). Paying people to prevent exploitation from plantation owners is a good thing.
This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that already happens, and their time spent not working is instead spent on improving their communities. I think that's still valuable, and maybe more valueable than making a billionaire slightly richer
Ubi compensates all work, rather than just what capitalists are willing to pay for. Id expect a good portion of software engineers to quit in a UBI world, so they can do open source projects instead.
The second order effect of putting everyone in the workforce is that nobody is having kids, and there's no community support for people on the edge of homelessness, or with mental health issues, or with drug issues.
Yes. The system incentives against it, yet and it still happens. Redesign the system so that it incentivizes for it and it'll happen way, way more.
The idea that the idle poor are running around "improving their communities is obviously bullshit. The poor already work fewer hours per person, and their communities are universally the most neglected.
> UBI compensates all work
Capitalism compensates work that someone is willing to pay for--i.e. work that consumers find valuable. UBI compensates "work" playing video games and sleeping until noon. Pretending that the latter is more moral than the former is positively asinine.
The issue here is the layabout is likely that way not from his own doings. There are many people you think are normal and fine, but are some degree of mindfucked and just want to find peace, quiet, guaranty, safety, basically the tranquility of mother's bosom because they got kicked too hard too many times.
Those are (IMO) who are your likely layabouts, who need to salve bleeding minds. Depression is high, suicides and deaths of despair are high. There is always an exit from the matrix and people commonly call it selfish to take it. I do not agree with this sentiment. I am not on that journey myself but have known others who were; though, I am introspective enough to understand that often times we can play key roles in other peoples' lives and we really need to try and be there for support and understanding as much as possible. Quit assuming bad faith, or the worst intentions in people even if it's Nash. We have to try to maintain the mindframe that others are acting in good faith, or at least as good enough faith as [they think] they can while trying to survive.
It's not an inherent function of capitalism. If anything, Marx himself actually pitched communism as boosting overall productivity of society by putting bourgeois to work.
For one, some people have extraordinary abilities, and will be pissed off if, in exchange for their extraordinary contributions, they only got the income "according to their needs", as defined by government. This basically takes away all the motivation to excel at something.
Also, the masses would be discontent because their perceived "needs" are much bigger that their actual ability to produce anything. This is partially remedied by capitalism, where the "greedy capitalist" basically forces them to work harder than they would out of their own free will.
Greed is greed and shouldn't be rewarded.
I otherwise basically agree with you... just that most people are basically able and society doesn't need to do things arbitrarily if there is a better (more direct) way...
We don't need to be in a constant state of production/consumption - we can take a break and still feed people. We throw out food if we aren't selling it because we'd rather let people starve than get a free loaf of bread... which really just stems from a lack of imagination and empathy.
Let's imagine a better world. Imagine and make it so.
The goals and incentives (for companies) aren't currently aligned with our needs & problems (as a society). So a lot of resources get spent on things like advertising, that (in theory) could instead be spent on solving problems related to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, if the incentives existed or the goals were set differently.
In capitalism people vote with their own money: if there is a demand for some good or service it keeps getting provided.
Of course you might argue, that average person can be manipulated into buying things that are harmful to them, but if you want to prevent that there's really no way to do that efficiently other than turning the whole country into a totalitarian surveillance state. And you also need an elite, a group of people who are above the law because they are just smarter, and know better and therefore set the rules for lesser beings.
I'm just pointing out that it's largely a universal truth that if we want a functioning society with food and roads and electricity and houses and internet, a lot of people are going to have to do something they would rather not do.
The "greedy capitalist" is more about how the work is coordinated. We have a market-based system where work assignments are more or less voluntary where he who signs the checks sets the work. But I am not volunteering myself to going back to a manorial or subsistence agriculture society.
Not every job is moral, essential or needed, the idea that 'everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a worker drone' needs to die.