Most people choose to work anyway

You can’t choose a thing and then expect not to get the drawbacks of that choice, except that people plainly can and do, all the time.

Take the case that annoys you most. Somebody lives on welfare and doesn’t work and spends their days doing something the person complaining considers worthless. They’re not doing anything criminal. They’re not doing anything immoral. They’re living entirely inside the bounds of what society has decided is acceptable, in exactly the way society decided to allow.

You might think welfare is a bad idea in the first place, and if you do then you’ll have heard yourself say the next part out loud and that we’d all be better off if people without jobs were left to starve. That’s a position and people hold it. But society as a collective has decided it doesn’t want that and having decided, it follows that we allow people to choose not to work and we pay their bills while they don’t. That’s not a loophole anyone is exploiting. That’s the system operating exactly as designed.

My own view is that a society is richer, by a long way, when people can live on their own terms. I’d far rather someone lived on welfare playing video games all day than was forced into a job they hate. Sometimes you’re just not in the right headspace to work and the amount of damage done by making a person in that state turn up somewhere every morning is not small and it doesn’t only land on them.

I took a couple of years off once and lived on my own money because I didn’t want a job any more. That’s the same choice with a different funding source and the only reason it looked respectable is that I’d been paid enough beforehand to cover it. If I ever need welfare to do that again, I’ll be very glad it exists and I’ll use it without any guilt about not contributing.

The objection is always the same. If most people did that, the system would collapse.

That’s true and it hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened anywhere it’s been tried, over decades, in countries with far more generous provision than this one. Most people choose to work because living on welfare is fairly grim and most people want more than it affords them. The pull of a better life turns out to be considerably stronger than the pull of doing nothing, which is not a surprise to anyone who’s tried doing nothing for more than a fortnight.

So the what if argument doesn’t do the work people want it to. If the collapse were going to happen it would have happened already, in some country, at some point and we’d be able to point at it. Instead the thing we can point at is a long run of places where the provision exists and the overwhelming majority of people work anyway.

An objection that predicts something you have watched repeatedly fail to occur isn’t really an objection to the policy. It’s a statement about what somebody expects other people to be like.

There’s a version of this you can test on yourself, which is to ask what you’d actually do with a year of guaranteed income and no obligations. Most people who answer honestly describe about three weeks of doing nothing, followed by something that looks a great deal like work, because being useful to somebody turns out to be one of the things people want rather than one of the things they endure to get money.

If that’s true of you, it’s worth asking why you assume it stops being true of everybody else.