Previously, I wrote about the financiability of Universal Basic Income, but I neglected to mention several variables within my calculations.

So, before I introduce the difficult-to-quantify variable that could turn all the calculations within my aforementioned article upside down, I'll go on a long, but very much necessary segue.

Social costs

Because printing money has an ugly tendency to cause inflation (I'll get to that later), the government's preferred source of revenue is from taxes, that is beyond any reasonable doubt. When the government provides you something "for free", it means that the government is paying for it - but because the government's main source of revenue is taxpayer money, it means that you are paying for it, albeit indirectly.

Hell, even printing money is sort of a form of taxation - when the government prints money, the total supply of money increases (no ****, Sherlock), but the supply of goods and services said money can be exchanged for doesn't change. This means that the value of money decreases. Everything gets more expensive. If you found a loophole that allowed you to legally counterfeit money, you wouldn't be making yourself any wealthier by printing money - you'd be simply making everyone poorer, decreasing their buying power in relation to you. This means that inflation could be easily seen as a form of taxation.

Thus, when the government is paying for something, society is paying for that thing. However, society is paying for more than just what the government is spending their taxpayer money on. These extra, non-governmental (or indirectly governmental, as the government controls the money supply, thus it somehow trickles down from the government to all the other anyway) expenditures are difficult to quantify, but they are the variable that could turn the whole calculation upside down.

Society as a whole - that is, the individuals who make up society - directly spends money on housing, transportation (the vehicles and fuel necessary for transportation), food, water, electricity, clothing, various other consumer items, and indirectly on the various tools, machinery, factories and human labour that goes into making said consumer items. Which is to say, that society as a whole spends money on human labour that creates value, either directly (via buying said value from the private vendor), or indirectly via the government as a proxy (albeit mostly only under Socialist systems).

However, there seem to be certain costs that seem.... out of place, don't you think?

On bull**** jobs

When it comes to the usefulness of a job to wider society, it's not a binary value, but a continuous spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, we have so-called "hero jobs", jobs that must be done to prevent society from collapsing (or regressing to an earlier, more primitive stage), jobs that are essential. On the other end of the spectrum, we have bull**** jobs: jobs that don't create any value, and very often in fact destroy value. Jobs that are not only unnecessary, but sometimes even harmful to society. And in between these two extremes, we have jobs that produce nonessential goods and services that are nice to have, but we could easily live without if **** hit the fan.

On the more heroic side of the spectrum, we have police officers (gotta catch the criminals), military (gotta defend the borders to prevent foreign invasions), farmers (gotta produce food), truckers (gotta transport said food to those who live in cities), construction workers (someone's gotta build your shelter that protects you from the elements), doctors and nurses. On the more bull**** side of the spectrum, we have HR/PR departments who do absolutely nothing that benefits the consumer, middle-management honchos whose only job is to make the lives of their underlings as miserable as possible, marketing people whose job is to advertise already existing products (thus adding absolutely nothing of value), etc.

If money is supposed to represent human labour (by proxy, as it can be exchanged for goods and services:fruits of human labour), then what warrants the high salaries of people who don't create value? No, I am not a Communist - I'm not talking about the CEO of the company, the man who paid for all the tools that his workers use, the man who has to shoulder the risks by being in the businesses: he's rightfully entitled to the profits of his business ventures. I'm talking about the HR/PR, marketing and middle-management guys. The ones who aren't involves in the creation of actual value - not even indirectly - yet are paid far more, than the ones that are involved.

How are these people paid? Obviously, their salary comes from the company's profits. But where does said profit come from? From the price of the goods and services the company is selling, of course! Which is to say, that everything is more expensive than it should be, because more money has to be made in order for the company to be able to afford those useless bottom-feeders whose jobs have nothing to do with the production of said products. By the time the company starts filming the commercials or starts paying for the Internet ads, the products are already on the store shelves, thus their prices are already set.

Society itself is indirectly paying the salaries of people whose jobs don't benefit society at all.

Is this not welfare with extra steps?

Bull**** jobs as welfare

Under a true Capitalist system, you create value either directly (e.g. by being a blacksmith who smiths horseshoes) or by proxy (by being the CEO of a company that produces horseshoes, thus paying for all the equipment required for the production of the horseshoes, hiring and paying the blacksmiths and then handling the distribution of the horseshoes), and you receive monetary rewards for having created said value, in the form of people buying what you produced. Under such a system, an income has the perquisite of creating value of some kind: a good or service for which there is a demand.

But we don't live in a truly Capitalist system. We live in a system in which an increasing number of people are being paid to do pretend-work, to do "work" that doesn't create any value. At best, that work is convincing you to buy a product that was already made and already has its price set, which means that the value has been already created, and the marketing-guy added nothing to it. Because their job doesn't involve creating any real value, their salary only exists by the grace of their employer, whose own salary equals the profits of his company, the sum of money consumers are willing to pay for the products the company produces - ergo, us consumers are indirectly paying all these useless bottom-feeders. Thus, a person who does a bull**** job is basically a welfare-recipient, just with less free time. Bull**** jobs are welfare with extra steps.

It reminds me of Communist Hungary, where the government essentially hid unemployment by simply making up fake jobs (most of which involved spying on your coworkers for the government) just to artificially reduce unemployment to zero (it was illegal to be unemployed in Communist Hungary) - only for this hidden unemployment to become real, visible unemployment once Communism ended.

However, you can't really call it truly Socialist either, as even being alive requires you to pay up regularly, and the government's "charity" doesn't extend to the idle poor. If employment is to be considered a human relationship, it's a particularly coerced and non-consensual one, as you are required to be in such a relationship just to remain alive (unless you're really lucky), which is not exactly my idea of consent. Unless you're already rich, you basically have two choices: the starvation or the plantation. Which is basically slavery with extra steps.

The system we live under is a horrific, dystopian Frankenstein economy that combines the worst of both worlds, while having the benefits of either.

What about UBI?

If you read my article about UBI, then you know that the article came to the sad conclusion that in three out of the four countries I examined, UBI would be more expensive than the existing social security programs, not less, even under the assumption that most of the cost of social security is lost to administrative overhead.

However, that article left out the variable of bull**** jobs, which might as well be counted into welfare, but aren't.

What if the salary of every marketing-person, HR/PR person, middle-management boomer, etc. was calculated into the welfare expenditures of a country? Sure, the government isn't paying them, but the very same taxpayers the government likes to milk who fund the government's welfare programs are also indirectly paying these bottom-feeders one way or another.

Sadly, the number is difficult to quantify, as it would take literal years of research to find out how much does the existence of these jobs cost to society as a whole, but I dare to say that if we found the number, and counted it in welfare costs, then suddenly, UBI would end up being the cheaper option compared to welfare.

But who will do all the work?

It's a common argument against Universal Basic Income that if we were all given enough money to survive without having to work for it, we'd all become lazy

Okay, so bull**** jobs exist, and society would be better off without those jobs. But there re still many essential jobs that need to be done to keep society running, and also plenty of jobs that produce goods and services that may be nonessential, but are definitely nice to have, and are often taken for granted in this day and age. What about them?

Well, first of all, a job's usefulness to society is independent from its resistance to automation. Truckers are absolutely necessary for the functioning of any society where the locations of production are scattered all over the place, often far away from the places where the consumers actually live. Yet truckers can be automated away: self-driving cars are already a thing. and WILL replace truckers, taxi-drivers, etc. So, first and foremost, automation is the answer. It absolutely has to come together with UBI.

The real reason why we as a society are so afraid of automating away millions of jobs, is because of our culture and economical system. On the cultural part, so many people make their jobs the focal points of their identity, and would be utterly devastated, if it was gone. On the economical side, we live in a work-or-die system, thus without UBI, automation is a no-go. Plus, replacing workers with robots - even if the robots are more effective - would reduce the amount of people whose incomes can be taxed - the government would have to tax companies instead, who would simply leave the country as a result. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem, a catch-22, where we need to make the great leap forward to bypass the problem.

Second of all, if we got rid of useless jobs that don't involve creating value - David Graeber argues that those jobs make up over half of the workforce - we could do all sorts of wonderful things even without the assumption of UBI. We could effectively halve the yearly work hours people have to do, and reallocate the workforce into actually meaningful jobs.

Third of all, the human desire to be a productive member of society is criminally underestimated by the anti-UBI naysayers. Humans are social creatures, who value a nice neighborhood, who value nice and trash-free streets, who value good food, etc. If suddenly liberated from the coercive need to sell one third of their entire lifespan for not starving to death, they'd probably find ways to willingly contribute to society, if not out of a desire to improve things, then out of sheer boredom. Who knows what could people - liberated from forced labour, full of energy - could do for society?

Fourth of all, UBI could trigger the return of seasonal work. People could become temporary farm hands during planting seasons. Having a large number of unemployed people would be a godsend to any organization that relies on volunteers.

Fifth of all, if we implemented UBI and automated away all the jobs that we could, those essentially jobs still done by humans would become more valued. They'd finally get the payment and social recognition they'd deserve.

Conclusion

In conclusion, rather than merely measuring the cost of UBI against the cost of existing officially published government expenditures, it might be smarter to measure the cost of UBI against the social cost of not just government expenditures, but everything else that we pay for, even though we don't benefit from.

A lot of jobs are basically welfare with extra steps. A lot of jobs involve pretending to work, rather than actually working. Why should these people be paid more than however much you intend UBI to be?