Guaranteed Basic Income, again.

Long day but actually a good one at work which was a nice change from grueling death marches.

I complain a lot about labor stuff not because I feel like I have it particularly bad, certainly not compared to those without jobs at all, but because there is no reason for anyone to have a bad job at all at this point in history.

Yeah I am talking about the idea of Guaranteed Basic Income again, it just makes sense, we don't live in a world that needs work, we have the technology and resources to give everyone in the country a reasonable standard of living regardless of what else they do. And having that as a part of our life will make things rather nicer for those who want to work anyway.

We could do away with the minimum wage, the Libertarians love to talk about how a minimum wage is unwarranted government interference, and if left alone the market will settle on a living wage, because people simply wouldn't work for a company if it didn't, and would leave for one that does. This is insane and stupid, companies will always pay as little as possible because they don't care about employees, only the bottom line, and people do not always, or even often, have the freedom to simply quit a job if they are unhappy, so there is no incentive for companies to raise their pay scale.

However if there was a GBI, a company would have to make sure their pay matched or exceeded that, otherwise there really wouldn't be a reason for anyone to work for them, the market would be able to correct to a livable wage without interference. Also people would leave the workforce in droves, forcing employers to examine their practices and make changes to attract people back.

People leaving the workforce isn't actually as bad as it sounds, for one thing we have the ability to automate a lot of our service and manufacturing sector, and that process proceeds apace even now, we literally won't be able to keep people employed under the current system if technological advances keep up, with automated factories, phone systems that actually are useful, self driving cars, delivery drones, and self checkout machines, there simply won't be a lot of jobs available a while down the line, yet people will still exist, and if our government is to be worth anything at all it will still need to care for them.

We don't need to work, we don't need to labor daily to feed ourselves, or we shouldn't anyway. There are those who argue that there area benefits to putting in a hard day of labor, and perhaps they are right, or perhaps they are trying to convince themselves that there is a benefit to being forced to spend the majority of their time away from their friends and family doing something they don't actually care about.

We have amazing brains, and human creativity never stops producing wonders, without tying survival to work, millions of people will have the chance to use those brains, how many Einsteins have died never having the opportunity to do anything other than flip burgers? How many Da'Vincis have died in foreign wars because they couldn't find anything else that would pay for school? How much have we lost because we have been convinced that the only path to self worth is to work?

In my positive moments I like to think we will see this in America during my lifetime, and I do feel it is inevitable, obviously there are challenges to it, legitimate ones anyway, but I don't see how we advance as a culture in a positive direction without it.