You're an entry level worker with few skills and little experience, living just above the poverty line. You're unemployed and thinking of eating your cat. Along comes unconditional basic income, and suddenly you're netting $20K a year. You were making $23K at your last job before you were laid off, so this isn't so bad!
A year later, your old boss calls you up and offers you your old job back. Awesome! Only now the salary is $6K, not $23K--the market wage now that everyone gets $20K.
Work 40 hours a week for an extra $6K? No thanks--you're doing okay with your basic living wage and zero effort. Plus, Rob is getting the band back together! And so you remain an unemployed entry level employee until you die.
It's pretty easy to fabricate a story to support whatever position you want:
You get laid off and along comes unconditional basic income. Your $20K is covering your basic expenses pretty well, but you're bored out of your skull (you sold the TV after you were laid off). Rob says he's getting the band back together and after a while you guys think you're starting to sound pretty good.
A year later your boss calls and offers you your job back. He wants to pay your $6K, you negotiate part time for $4K so you still have time to devote to the band. Your boss agrees since he can just hire another person or two for less than your old salary.
With your extra money you pay for time in a recording studio and new instruments. Your band becomes wildly successful and you quit your job since royalties are now making you wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. And so you rise above your entry level beginnings and tell people stories of how you've achieved the American Dream until you die.
I don't get it. If nobody wants the 6k job, how is it that nobody is offering more? Are there less people looking for workers?
Let me tell that history again. Yeah, you get that 20k a year. Then your old boss calls, and just offers you 30k for that job you used to do for 23k. You can either join your old friends on their band again, or get a total 50k a year, your choice.
Now, about your old boss, he'll have to pay more, no questions about it. But the total cost of salary is trending down anyway, so the best option is to start with a small basic income, and grow it at the proportion that income concentrate at the top.
This is a fascinating comment, encapsulating all that I disagree with from opponents of BI. There's the guess that market wages for jobs less desirable than touring with your band would trend much lower, which seems unlikely.
But more, you seem to think having people pursuing what they enjoy because they have more leverage over potential employers is obviously a bad thing!
That's clearly an unresolvable moral distinction; I am strongly, STRONGLY in favor of more people pursuing what they love at the cost of paying more for jobs I consider no fun to be done.
Certainly many people will sit around much of the time; why in the world do I care? While it is possible society will collapse because all humans require external threats to be productive, that seems extremely unlikely to me.
Lots of people will get a chance to pursue meaningful work instead of drudgery. I am all in favor of this.
> A year later, your old boss calls you up and offers you your old job back. Awesome! Only now the salary is $6K, not $23K--the market wage now that everyone gets $20K.
This requires the rather counter-intuitive assumption that providing an additional source of income decreases the market clearing cost of a unit of labor. The basic rules of supply and demand indicate that it would increase the market clearing cost of labor.
> Work 40 hours a week for an extra $6K? No thanks--you're doing okay with your basic living wage and zero effort. Plus, Rob is getting the band back together!
Work other than traditional wage labor ("getting the band back together) isn't zero effort. Its perhaps very-high-risk, but a major focus of BI is to reduce the incentive to engage in low-risk drudgery over higher-risk activities that might have greater personal attraction but less certainty of financial payoff, including artisitic and entrepreneurial activities.
> And so you remain an unemployed entry level employee until you die.
No, if you choose pursuits other than wage labor -- like independent artistry or entrepreneurship -- you aren't any kind of employee. You seem to be stuck in the mode that everyone must be a drone, and is defined by what kind of drone they are, even going so far as to engage in contradictions that are obvious on their face to further that model (the whole "unemployed employee").
A year later, your old boss calls you up and offers you your old job back. Awesome! Only now the salary is $6K, not $23K--the market wage now that everyone gets $20K.
Work 40 hours a week for an extra $6K? No thanks--you're doing okay with your basic living wage and zero effort. Plus, Rob is getting the band back together! And so you remain an unemployed entry level employee until you die.