If you pay a living wage to a zillion people, they have to be assigned some sort of valuable work to do if it's not just a UBI system. The government already pays everyone to do the work the government wants done, so the target of this inflation-funded labor value would be, what, precisely? There's only so much garbage that needs picking up.

In this case, I'm arguing because of the economic class of the ditch diggers that this is not the case. The ditch diggers will spend the money locally, rather than saving it, on things that give them greater utility than what the people paying for ditches would have gotten (which is most likely just saving it).

I agree asking people to dig ditches for the money is stupid, but in reality they'd either be doing something productive that wouldn't have otherwise been done for structural reasons (building national parks, windmills, solar panels, etc., things where there is a positive externality that prevents the market from doing it) or receiving the money for free.

What I said was that it always will pay off to work and therefore incentives people to work.

Thats a very different argument than the one you are arguing against.

"We throw them in jail if they don't"? We don't do that presently.

What we're talking about is "in addition to anything they earn, they choose the disposition of $X/yr", for various values for X. If X is $1, clearly everyone is still working. I agree with you that the $40k figure you cite downthread is extremely likely to be higher than we can support. I think there are intermediate values that might work substantially better than $0. Based on toying with numbers that I've done in the past, my guess is that the optimum value $4k and $9k/yr (though I'm not all that confident in that and would probably want to see it ramped up gradually). If you claim that this would mean "essentially all manual labor stopped overnight", that certainly needs a citation.

Do you realize how much water is worth to you? You cannot live without it, but you aren't going to send your water company $100/gallon for it because there is a massive supply of it.

The same applies to paying people to do things. Nobody is going to pay more than what the price is for the skills they are looking for. To expect otherwise or lament the fact that's it's not happening shows a very basic misunderstanding of economics.

I also don't think that paying off state debt right now is a good idea. Interest rates are pretty much zero or even negative. We should instead borrow as much as possible. For example we could invest trillions into getting rid of fossil fuels in the next twenty years. That would also create many jobs.

What happens if nobody has a job?

OK, that's a little extreme. Let's see, a family of five would get 12500 F per month unconditionally. That's probably a pretty good chunk of money for doing nothing.

I see images of five to ten people living together to collectively earn 25000 F per month.

In the same story they talk about limiting executive pay to 12x the salary of the lowest paid employee. Again, I just don't see it. In a global market I just don't see intelligent and capable people not looking past their borders seeking better compensation for what they have to offer.

How can you build a sustainable and competitive society this way? Again, I'll admit to not being mentally equipped to comprehend how this can work. Perhaps someone can educate me.

The employees are doing work, they are spending their time. That should be reduced.

At the end of the chain is either someone spending time, spending health, or using natural resources. Those are the costs.

Far better for a company to simply give the money to the employee, receive the same amount of work in return, but not have the employee spending any time

What's better, paying someone $100 to dig a hole and fill it back in, or give that person $100?

Imagine a world where every need is met without having to do anything, with no costs - to humans, to the environment, to resources.

Think how much time that gives to people to be free to do what they want

Able bodied people that choose to do nothing deserve to receive nothing.

Remember, corporate profits are only the indirection of the translation of time into things and acts. People buy a McRib to eat, but if they had to pay the supply chain of that McRib reasonable wages they would probably rather eat something else for that price, something healthier and tastier most likely.

Though in all honesty, the real problem is not forcing employers who do employ people to give them more money than they would be willing to work for. The problem is that those wages constitute the survival of that individual, even when in our current society it is asinine to think people are contributing to one another's survival more than they are contributing to superfluous wants. The fraction of our workforce involved in providing food, shelter, security, and health are probably at most one in ten. The rest are there for wants. Our social organization needs to start reflecting that more rather than making the unskilled writhe in destitution for scraps of a living.

If you want to see what giving people housing for free does, look at public housing. When there is no profit incentive to keep it maintained, they inevitably decline into decrepit eyesores as the government bureaucracy assigned to maintain it can’t manage.

I mean, lets pretend you get $400/w from the government, and you are okay living on that. Now lets assume you decide you want a new toy, or some general spending money. Your base government income has your rent and food paid for, but you want fun money.

How much time is that fun money worth? Would you work a whole week for $50? What about $200?

I also wonder if there's a bit of a mental incentive to push you to better yourself. If you're working a week for $200, maybe you consider it a waste of your time. So, you fight for a better job, maybe through training or education. Now you've got plenty of fun money, but you also start to raise your base lifestyle (and income requirements).

I don't think any of these are absolutes of course, i'm just curious what would happen in these sort of environments. Everything i say here is a question, not an answer.

Keeping people employed for no positive economic benefit is literally tantamount to lightning money on fire. You are paying people who would otherwise be creating value elsewhere _not_ to create that value and instead play a useless role intermediating in garbage can manufacture. They would still be buying groceries and burning gas in that productive job, but the difference is that they would also be creating something useful for society.