On The Supposed Desirability and Virtue of Paid Labor

Van Parijs wants to make clear that he does not mean to deny “the importance of work and the role of personal responsibility” with his advocacy of the UBI. His motive, rather, is to provide reasoned, ethical defenses against (thanks to the Anglo-Saxon economic hegemony) “a fashionable political rhetoric that justifies bending the least advantaged more firmly under the yoke.” In so doing, he wishes to persuade us that there is more justice to “everyone being entitled to an income, even the lazy” than to “everyone being entitled to a vote, even the incompetent.”

Funding for the UBI and/or the negative income tax might derive from resource transformation taxes, land rent and other forms of rent (as the accountants candidly put it, rent is “unearned income” anyway), and positive income taxes.  In this regard of limiting income differentials, minimum income should be able to afford food, clothing, shelter, basic health and education. Maximum income might be placed at ten times minimum income since evidence from the military and the civil service shows that this income differential is able to generate sufficient incentive such that all available jobs are filled voluntarily.

Secondly, as the UBI already broached above  suggests, there is the matter of justice. The provision of paid labor for everyone requires economic growth. As every economist knows, there is a trade-off between growth and equity. For example, companies may threaten to automate or to outsource jobs if workers do not accept lower wages and/or reduced or even non-existent benefits (e.g. health-care insurance). Without the appropriate macroeconomic interventions such as those suggested above in connection with alternative means of distributing income, equity becomes the casualty and the cost of paid labor. Why should we permit this, as we currently do? Does the economy exist for its own sake or to further the quality of life of the people it serves?

Thirdly, economic growth to afford low paying jobs, by increasing production without bound, precipitates disruptive environmental stresses from such actions as habitat clearing, habitat fragmentation, unsustainable harvests, inadvertent introduction of alien species (from global operations), pollution, and resource extraction  (e.g. strip-mining). Is the capacity of the planet to support life a price worth paying for low-paying jobs? Is hard work  the only way for us to derive self-esteem? Can any of us outwork an industrial robot?

This brings us to the fourth and concluding matter—the matter of meaningful lives. As mortal beings, surely our most important possession is the limited amount of time we have to live. Do we really wish to squander that limited time by earning money through the production of goods and services that can be possessed (i.e. hence, private goods and services) and that therefore can be purchased; or shouldn’t we rather produce goods and services that can be shared without being depleted (i.e. so-called public goods and services), such cultural  and civilized desiderata as philosophy, science, arts, letters, caregiving, volunteer work, conservation, philanthrophy? After all, are not the things worth doing are those we would, in the absence of the profit motive and on pain of existential torment, do anyway even if we were not paid to do them because we thought they were worth doing or sharing?