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by josephcsible 1872 days ago
There's a difference between "I don't spend literally all of my time productively contributing to society" and "I never productively contribute to society".
3 comments

Why is a job synonymous with "productively contributing to society"? I can think of a lot of jobs that appear to make society worse and a lot of activities that aren't jobs that make society much much better.
It is a mistake to assume that those living on UBI and not working in formal employment would be "never productively contributing to society". Sure, a portion of UBI recipients might be entirely idle, but others would contribute to things that are seen as a social positive even if they don’t neatly fit into profit-generating, paid-salary-position-creating activities.

For example, if I didn’t have to work myself, I could finally do some of the more ambitious contributions to OpenStreetMap that I have been dreaming of: adding all the missing house numbers for my county, for instance. Then society as a whole benefit from that libre resource even if I as a contributor was not paid a salary for it. By the same token, some of the most active Wikipedia editors are able to dedicate such enormous time and effort because, for whatever reason, they do not work. Yet all of us here benefit day in and day out from what they do.

I expect that in practice, you'd get way more entirely idle people than you would people who worked on things like OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia.
So?
It‘s fine that you want to have a fun pastime, just don't force me to pay for it (via taxes).
And where in that false dichotomy do you put raising children?
How is what I said a false dichotomy? I'm not saying those are the only two possibilities. I'm just saying they're not one and the same, which my parent comment implied they were.