I sympathize with the sentiment, but I think your statement could be misread as overly harsh.
I would emphasize that money solves all problems measured in money, but humans care about things not measured in money. So faced with a janitorial job making minimum wage $13/hr or a volunteer gig that can only afford a $3/hr stipend, it lets the person take the job that pays more in ways not necessarily measured in money -- it some evolved enlightened form of capitalism that frees us from the serfdom of capitalism itself or some such aggrandization nonsense.
But we've been dreaming about the cultured and creative paradise that only a life formed solely on the unlocked potential of leisure could afford since the dawn of the industrial age, so shrug Maaaaybe this time is different...
> It lets the person whose labor is only worth $3/hour take a $3/hour job and still not starve to death.
You'd still know that your labor is worth only $3/hour, and if you're not starving to death it's because you're on this safety net.
How is this feeling "you're serving a purpose" and that "there's value in what you do" as per my parent comment? Again, a job is about much more than the money, and "not starving to death".
> You'd still know that your labor is worth only $3/hour, and if you're not starving to death it's because you're on this safety net.
But your labor is worth only $3/hour. The only way to change that is for the person to improve their skillset, but if that was practical in a given case then it would happen regardless.
Value is not intrinsic to the object, but varies depending on the market and its rules. Go to another country and your labour might be worth more or less.
So your labor is not worth $3/hour, it's worth $3/hour in this market. The approach I think would be better for everyone is designing the market so that your labor holds some value.
> Value is not intrinsic to the object, but varies depending on the market and its rules. Go to another country and your labour might be worth more or less.
Sure, but the issue is the relative difference between what your labor is worth and what your costs are. Automation reduces unskilled wages, meanwhile the worker's costs for necessities like housing have if anything gone up over time.
You could try to fix this by artificially raising wages for unskilled workers, but that's counterproductive. Increasing costs will increase prices workers pay when they buy things or drive people to substitute with alternatives that cause workers to lose their jobs. Exactly the opposite of the desired result.
What you really want is to reduce the cost of necessities so the wages they actually earn will go further. Doing so using government subsidies brings us right back to a UBI, and you seem to want something else.
The something else is basically changing the laws around housing and medicine to increase competition and drive down prices. Doing that is a good idea but good luck with that. The incumbents have a ton of lobbyists and a vested interest in staying fat.
I do believe in raising the minimum wage, but how does that address the fact that outsourcing and automation have been reducing and will continue to reduce the supply of jobs?
Thousands of people have skills that are not worth enough, these days, to support the lifestyle they are used to. That's the problem here.
Except that the employee can walk away from an employer who doesn't pay enough and still keep the UBI.
And the demand for labor at $3/hour is huge. People making even $40K/year would stop doing their own laundry or washing their own cars if they could hire someone to do it for that price. Good luck convincing anyone to work for $1/hour when everyone else is paying more.
Moreover, even if someone could only get a job for $1/hour, what is that supposed to change? Then they get a job at $1/hour + UBI, they don't starve, and the second someone offers $2/hour they trade up. Or they decide that their time is worth more than that to themselves and spend it volunteering to gain experience or going to school or whatever. Which one of these is supposed to be a problem?
Why? Minimum wage is largely designed to stop people being exploited by a form of economic slavery, but the UBI should prevent that, and mean that the wage has to be attractive.
