On The Supposed Desirability and Virtue of Paid Labor

On the Supposed Desirability and Virtue of Paid Labor

It may seem the height of lunacy, now that so many jobs have been lost, to impugn the desirability of paid labor. Yet as this piece will attempt to show, there may be good reasons for doing so.

Firstly, paid labor is not the only way to distribute income  amongst the population. Alternatives include dividends from stock ownership in companies (supposing the necessary macroeconomic interventions redistributing  societal income to permit this, such as limiting the income differential to ten or twenty, for example, since it is relative rather than absolute income that determines purchasing power) and/or a negative income taxes (subsidies to below-subsistence incomes) and/or what has been termed the Universal Basic Income (UBI).

A UBI  (advocated by Van Parijs, among others) is “an income paid by a government, at a uniform level and at regular intervals, to each adult member of society.” It is income fixed at a certain level that is paid “whether the person is rich or poor, lives alone or with others, is willing to work or not.” It may apply (indeed, in most versions it does) to include, not only citizens, but permanent residents as well. The characterization “basic” does not mean that the UBI is necessarily expected to meet “basic needs” (the UBI may be well below subsistence or well above it); all it means is that it is income that a person can rely upon whatever his circumstances.

The fundamental authorization for the UBI arises from the operation of historical accidents. As Van Parijs defends it against those who object to the UBI on the grounds that it is “undeserved good news for the idle surfer”, providing the idle surfer with a UBI

is ethically indistinguishable from the undeserved luck that massively affects the present distribution of wealth, income, and leisure. Our race, gender, and citizenship, how educated and wealthy we are, how gifted in math and how fluent in English, how handsome and even how ambitious, are overwhelmingly a function of who our parents happened to be and of other equally arbitrary contingencies. Not even the most narcissistic self-made man could think that he fixed the parental dice in advance of entering this world. Such gifts of luck are unavoidable and, if they are fairly distributed, unobjectionable. A minimum condition for a fair distribution is that everyone should be guaranteed a modest share of these undeserved gifts. Nothing could achieve this more securely than a UBI.