Is it really your opinion that 100% of people, or even a very significant number of people, WOULD take society up on this offer? And not just for a limited time while studying, raising a child, starting a business, etc - but forever, content to live on protein paste in their small apartment?
If so, then fine, but you (and @Odesio if he agrees with this) DO believe that
I don’t think that’s human nature, personally. I base this on… let’s see… every single person I know. My parents could retire today and live out their life (much more comfortably than UBI would allow) but that would never even occur to them. I could have stayed at my company’s entry level position for the next 30 years and had a much easier go at it than I currently do, again while remaining much more comfortable than UBI would allow (in fact, I know people who did exactly that). But we all want more, so we do more than the bare minimum.
I don’t see why a UBI would magically change that. A couple of the long haul entry employees might quit (though honestly, would they? They’d need something to fill their days, and now all they earn could go towards luxury goods) but I doubt it would be much more than a blip.
I know that, after I had been in low wage jobs for well over a decade, if someone offered me a chance to sit in a room and eat protein paste with no worries about bills, I would have taken them up on the offer.
For a time, until I had recovered from the mental and physical hardships I had put myself through. Then I’d go out and start looking for something productive to do.
But, rather than take what jobs are available, even if I hate it, even if it barely pays the bills, I would have the flexibility to do something that enriches both myself and the world.
Certainly! I think if we implemented UBI we’d have a Great Reshuffling where businesses have to rethink how they engage with their entry/low level staff. Some businesses would be stuck in an old way of thinking and fail, while others will seize the opportunity and prosper.
If you are consuming the products of labor but you have voluntarily chosen not to work when you could and are not in school, you are a parasite on society.
‘Anti-Work’ is a movement of rich people. Poor people don’t even question that they need to work to survive. When I was starting out, the idea of voluntarily not working while expecting others to look after you was not a thing. Everyone understood that their first step in adulthood was to figure out the kind of work they could do that would support themselves and their family, hopefully while being fulfilling but even if not. The option of not working simply wasn’t there. And the few people who tried it were generally looked down upon as being a drag on everyone else, lazy, irresponsible, and headed for failure.
You have no right to something that requires other people to work on your behalf to provide it. And we don’t have the money to fund everyone who doesn’t want to work. The inflation of the last year should put the final nail in the coffin of MMT and other schemes to finance a UBI.
If you are thinking a tax on billionaires would do it, think again. The money needed for a real UBI would bankrupt all of them in very short order. There are about 215 million working age people in the US. Giving even $1,000 per month to each of them would require 215 billion dollars per month. You would run through all the money of the billionaires in the first year. And of course, to provide that money you would have to liquidate SpaceX, Tesla, Amazon, etc since most billionaire money is in stocks of companies. You can’t just access it without massive economic destruction.
The prime duty of a citizen is to not be a burden on others if it can be avoided. If you find yourself in that situation, your responsibility is to get out of it as soon as possible, and to ‘pay forward’ charity given to you when you can afford to give it to others.
If enough people decide to become non-productive and live off the charity of others, we will eventually impoverish ourselves, and then everyone will be working again out of necessity. Because wealth is really hard to build, but very easy to squander.
Those who forget this lesson will soon learn it again, the hard way.
I never heard the theory that UBI is designed to enable all the parasites on society to get up one day and voluntarily choose not to work, more like ensuring that people still have an income even when they get sick or laid off or are 95 years old. Short-term experiments in places like Finland demonstrated, to nobody’s great surprise, that people did not feel more financially secure while receiving the modest grant of 500–600 euros per month if they were otherwise unemployed.
Your scenario of requiring people to work on others’ behalf is a theoretical and/or practical issue in countries with an aging and/or decreasing population causing the ratio of employment to population ratio to get off balance. Not sure what the optimum balance is, but data I was able to find on the Internet shows that the employment to population ratio in Sweden has hovered at roughly around 60% for the past 30 years, compared to 50% for France, 55% for Finland, 60% in Estonia, 60% in Japan, and also (very roughly) 60% in the USA (with some variation, of course, like the downward hit due to the latest pandemic that is now slowly recovering)
Emphasis added. That’s a weird carve-out. I don’t see why an adult who might otherwise be expected to be self-supporting via paid work would somehow get an arbitrary exemption from “parasite” status just because they’re going to school.
One might argue that somebody who’s going to school is benefiting society by becoming more knowledgeable and educated and increasing their future earning potential. Sure, but one might also argue that for a lot of other self-improvement endeavors that aren’t providing a paycheck.
Why should being “in school” count as an acceptable non-“parasitic” alternative to earning one’s living, rather than a voluntary hobby to be carried out in a paid worker’s spare time?
Then there’s the issue of all the other types of unpaid work that directly benefit society, such as caring for children and other family members, volunteering in one’s community, and so forth. It seems to me absurd to try to draw a clear binary distinction between being a good citizen and being a “parasite on society” based solely on whether one’s activities in society are earning (enough) money.
School has long been an accepted part of learning to be a contributing member of society. Besides, if you are going to college you are either supported by family, or you are working your way through, borrowing money you have to pay back, or getting scholarships because you have demonstrated that you have an above-average ability to succeed at school and become a highly valued member of society.
Did this really need to be said? There’s a big difference between not working because you are in school, and not working because you’d rather sit around and play video games or bitch about life on the Internet. Parents understand this, and everyone used to.
Now, if you are going to school because you want to party for four years and take the easiest thing you can find and expect society to pay for it, that’s another matter.
Likewise, if you voluntarily took out student loans to pay your way, you have a responsibility to pay them back. Demanding that society ‘forgive’ (ie force others to pay for) your student loans puts you back in the ‘parasite’ category. Another fundamental rule of good citizenship is that you honor your commitments and pay your debts to the best of your ability.
It’s not weird at all. A fairly common refrain young adults hear from their parents is, “If you want to keep living under my roof, you better be working or in school.” Most people going to school intend to go to work once they graduate.
So why not just target aid to the elderly or those who need it? That makes a lot more sense then just giving money to everyone.
So if you are a student being “supported by family” then you are automatically not a “parasite on society”? But if you are spending your time making sculpture or writing a novel or some other artistic or scholarly endeavor while being supported by family, then you are a “parasite on society”?
That’s silly. I could see making the internally logical case that whatever you choose to do, you have to be either self-supporting or family-supported, or grant- or scholarship- or loan-supported, in order not to count as a “parasite”. But it seems bizarre to try to draw the line of “parasitism” for the non-self-supporting so that it falls between schoolwork and all other activities.
And that still doesn’t address the absurdity of treating, say, a full-time carer for young children as a “parasite on society”, even if they’re neither self-supporting nor family-supported. It’s hard to think of a less parasitical activity than nurturing and caring for society’s next generation of adults.
Apparently it did, because your ideas about it still seem pretty muddled and inconsistent.
I know, but it’s weird to see that uncritically adopted as a general criterion for sociological assessment of who is or is not a “parasite on society”.
I don’t find it weird at all. Someone is going to school now so they can work at something later. But aside from school, there are also “non-working” people we don’t view as parasites including parents who stay at home to help care for family members, retired people, the disabled, etc., etc.
That’s somewhat debatable too. For at least some borrowers, a case might be made that morally speaking, society was engaging in a form of predatory lending practice by trying to persuade them that their student loans were a good investment and they would be able to comfortably repay them via lucrative employment.
A lot of student borrowers in the past couple decades were encouraged to have a much rosier vision of their post-college financial security than was borne out by their actual experience. (Not to mention that most of them were fairly naive teenagers when they were making those loan repayment commitments.) They might not have signed up for so much debt if society’s snake-oil sellers had been giving them a more honest picture of their futures.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting that debts shouldn’t be taken seriously; I repaid my own college loan debt and I don’t feel in any way cheated by it. Then again, it was a much more manageable amount than many students facing today’s tuition prices can expect, so I don’t feel in any way cheated as a taxpayer by the possibility of some student debt forgiveness for later generations of borrowers.
Sure, but why should “school” be singled out as the only acceptable “non-parasitical” way to increase one’s future earning potential? Suppose somebody is writing a novel now so they can sell it and then continue earning money as a writer later, for example. Why should our hypothetical social support system consider that that person is automatically a “parasite” but somebody earning a college degree is not?
Depends whom you ask, I guess. AFAICT from what Sam_Stone has posted, he thinks that such people do count as parasites, although perhaps not if their families are supporting them. Again, I have a hard time seeing the caring work of such individuals as “parasitical” even if they’re doing it all on the taxpayer’s dime.
Thanks for calling me a parasite, Sam. I choose not to work, though I easily could. And I partially live off the UBI for seniors called Social Security. Now I also live off money I saved, but nothing in your definition excludes the retired or people living off of inheritances from the parasite label.
Worse than that, there were plenty of “colleges” whose business plan was extracting as much money from students as possible while giving as little useful education as possible. The Obama administration tried to shut these down and give their victims a break. Betsy De Vos of course reversed it. But since she worked for one of these grifters it is hardly surprising.
The whole inheritance issue is an especially glaring example of the intellectual poverty of attempting to base the concept of “social parasitism” purely on monetary criteria. A wealthy person who does no work at all of any kind, contributes nothing to their community, avoids taxes with “buy borrow die” wealth management, and so on, doesn’t count as a “parasite” because their consumption is at least nominally coming from their own wealth.
But somebody who constantly volunteers in the community, helps municipal organizations and neighborhoods run smoothly, works on community improvements, etc., but doesn’t get paid for it—or even just doesn’t get paid enough for it to live on—is branded a “parasite” if they get, say, food stamps or subsidized housing to make up for their income deficiencies.
In real life, that just doesn’t make sense. Who in this situation is actually giving to the community and working on behalf of others, and who is just free-riding in lazy selfish isolation on other people’s efforts? You simply can’t measure an individual’s value to society solely by the metric of whether the amount of money in their possession is enough to make them financially self-supporting.
I’m with you on student loans. We drill into the heads of young people that college is their path to economic success, often while ignoring other paths, and then we present them with predatory loans. We’ve set up a system where these young people can be easily exploited and I don’t think it’s unfair for us to help them. I don’t have any problem the idea of student dept relief.
Sure, I’m open to other avenues. I wish I could remember who, but I recall one famous author who’s wife agreed to support him with the stipulation that if he failed to sell a story within a year or two that he’d get a job. But I’m not convinced that setting up a UBI so people can try to write the next great American novel is a great idea. On a personal note, I’m also not so keep on labeling people as parasites as all too often that label is also applied to people who genuinely can’t work and I don’t think that’s fair. Plus, such dehumanizing language can lead to some very dark places.