My least favorite things about anti- UBI discourse is always the techbros whining that “nobody is going to work anymore! People will just watch Netflix all day!” and I have 2 responses:
1) Who the fuck cares. Who the fuck cares what people do with their time! That’s kind of the fucking point!
2) People aren’t going to stop laboring. Housework (look, it’s right there in the word!) will still need to be done. So will maintenance on our homes and personal spaces. Children will still need carers, as will the elderly and disabled. There are millions of examples of ~work~ that we do all the time, uncompensated, that won’t suddenly stop because we aren’t forced to sell our labor to provide corporation’s profits.
I’m not surprised that what is traditionally women’s work is invisible to these dipshits, but it never fails to anger me.
Anyway. Join the IWW.
Field studies have been conducted in several countries now, and the result is always the same - people will just flop about for a couple of months to recover from the burnout most people who have a job live with, and then they look for something to do. Some get a job with reduced hours, and some start doing charitable stuff like volunteering in soup kitchens and teaching others to do whatever their particular skill is. They socialize more, they are happier, and on average, people will work more, not less.
But the thing is, employers suddenly have to think about how to make their jobs appealing enough for someone to come and do them! It’s hard to find someone to work for you for long hours under horrible conditions, if they can just choose not to; which shows you how voluntary our current system actually is.
Oh my god, as a disabled person who cannot work, you have no idea what it’s like to be unemployed full time indefinitely. It suuucks. There’s a reason why when one of my friends retired, all of his friends told him he needed to make sure he had things to fill his days
People want to work. People want to be useful. I volunteered to make rehearsal tracks for my choir because I wanted to work. I have beta-read friends’ fics because I can’t work as an editor any more.
UBI just means that you can’t trap people in abusive environments because they have no alternative any more.
I find it VERY funny that this guy is basing his opinion of UBI on his experience of running a school, given that the main population of a school is literal fucking children. Of course kids are going to want to watch Netflix and play video games: they’re fucking kids. If you left everything up to me when I was in middle school, I would have eaten nothing but yogurt and PB&Js, forgone all housework and personal hygiene, and doing nothing but read books or watch TV all day. Because I was a kid.
Adults – you know, the main people who would actually be receiving UBI – are not like that. Anyone else remember all the hobbies people picked up during COVID lockdown, like baking sourdough or sewing masks? They did that because they suddenly had a huge amount of free time on their hands that they could devote to stuff other than work. I don’t think you could have a better sample size than most of the country if you’re wondering how people would handle UBI.
