Why do we celebrate entrepreneurs for chasing passive income but condemn the idea of universal basic passive income as making people lazy? Both strategies aim for financial security without daily work. Let's normalize a financial floor for everyone, not just the investment-savvy with enough capital.
Because one allows wiggle room for the celebration of unnecessary and unimaginative "grind culture" while the other doesn't. That's all there is to it.
It's more insidious than that, I'm afraid. UBI would mean far more people have the option to *not* work a given job. It's less about celebrating grind and more because the people at the top are worried it would make normal people far more resistant to the routine exploitation they depend upon.
Good one. Also pretty much explains why there are also politicians who are against UBI. It's like they really want to keep the population that they serve only as "educated" as they want them to be.
This all springs from the foundational belief that there are simply different grades of human. Fine people need to be incentivised with the carrot of enormous reward while others must be driven by the stick of material precariousness. This is the core right wing instinct.
Fun trivia: immediately prior to the end of the Republic of Rome, Roman politics was split between the Optimates ("best men") and Populares ("men of the people"); they had a civil war because the leader of the Optimates had a hissy fit at not getting his way all the time.
The Optimates led troops into Rome and seized power by force (and ultimately had all the Populares leaders executed) and set the precedent by which Caesar did the same thing a short while later and ended the Republic. In an admittedly silly and reductive way, right wing bullshit ruins everything.
Especially when you consider that those who accumulate capital tend to do so by paying those who work for them a wage that keeps them always one paycheck from going hungry.
They're against UBI because hunger is the recruitment tool that keeps sewers clean, fields harvested, coal mined, etc.
