If You Think Free Money Kills Work Ethic, Your Definition of “Work” Is Horrible.

Stop telling me that money is the reason people work.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with my parents about universal basic income.

They’re in their late fifties, and are very staunch supporters of traditional capitalism. I can understand why they feel this way. Both their families raised themselves up out of the mud — my mom’s father grew up in a wood shack in Kentucky with no running water or power, and painstakingly built a business that bought all his kids college degrees.

More to the point, my parents’ mid-adult lives ran almost exactly parallel to the Cold War; and they tried to raise me, too, to believe that communists are evil and lazy — which, in my parents’ morality, are both essentially the same thing. It’s not much of a leap from anti-communist to anti-universal basic income.

My parents aren’t just mouthpieces for rhetoric, though, obviously — they’ve got their own well-formed opinions, and are more than capable of defending them intelligently.

We love our dinner-table debates.

Their reasons for recoiling at the notion of universal basic income are roughly the same as their reasons for refusing a homeless man’s request for money — reasons I’ve heard from other people all over the world, which I expect many of us have shared at some point in our lives, at least to some extent:

“He’ll probably spend the money on booze and drugs. If he really wanted money he’d be looking for a job. He’s probably making more than most college kids, out here panhandling.”

“It’ll just reinforce his lazy behavior.”

“He who shall not work shall not eat.” Which I’m sure was a very important principle back in the 1600s, when our ancestors were literally starving to death in the New England winter. Maybe not so much anymore, when grocery stores throw away 133 billion pounds of food every year.

Oh, but let’s not forget the reason that lies behind all the others: “I worked for this money. The Precious is mine to use as I please! That guy has no right to ask for free money from people who’ve worked for it.”

Well. One could make the argument that that guy is working for it, standing out here in the cold all day, approaching everyone who walks by. Even if it’s just an act he’s putting on, he must be very talented at his job if — as you say — he’s making more money than a college student does.

But let’s leave that aside, and focus on the real meat of my parents’ argument against universal basic income. Here’s that argument again, boiled down to its barest bones:

“If we gave free money to everyone, no one would have any motivation to work.”

What a horrific definition of “work” that is!

Stated another way, this argument says that the only reason anyone works at all, at anything, is so they don’t starve and freeze.

And we all know that simply isn’t true. We all know people who work for other reasons than to make money — artists and musicians who pay for their tools out of their own pockets, cooks who throw dinner parties at their own expense, gardeners who grow fruit for the color and taste, doctors and nurses who donate their time because they care about saving lives, athletes who run and lift and kickbox for the sheer joy of it.

If the only reason you work is to make money, I don’t call that work ethic at all. I call it a fear of being broke. It’s like saying the only reason you don’t rape and murder is for fear of going to prison.

That’s not morality; it’s just a fear of punishment.

The truth is, I know a lot of people right now who want to devote their lives to creating better work — to making weirder music, cooler schools, cleaner engines, safer cities, and many other things — and the only things holding them back are a lack of resources and a time-sucking day job. Those people would keep working on those projects no matter how much money they had. That’s real work ethic.

“But if no one had to do gritty jobs,” I can hear my parents saying, “The economy would collapse!”

Would it, though?

I’m not talking about hitting the OFF switch on our entire national economy overnight. I’m not even talking about communism or socialism, per se. Changes that abrupt are almost never a good idea for large societies.

But listen — some of us are already complaining about robots and computers taking over our jobs, and every expert I can find predicts that those takeovers are only going to increase, in an ever-expanding circle of industries, over the next fifty years.

Why not just let them?

Maybe this particular scenario sounds like silly utopian (or dystopian) sci-fi. Maybe it is — hell, I don’t know. I’m not a robot expert, and I’ll be honest and up-front: I don’t know exactly how the infrastructure question will play out, in practical terms. Plenty of theorists are tackling this topic as we speak, and I’m sure their numbers will keep multiplying. More power to them. But my focus here is the argument around laziness and work ethic.

Let’s think about what might happen if we decided to find out for real — once and for all — who really wants to work, and who’s just been working because they had to.

Imagine walking into a restaurant, and knowing the man taking care of you is there solely because he wants to be — he’s smiling not because he needs tips to pay rent, but because he chose to come here today and cook a meal for you, of his own free will.

Stop for a second and really, seriously think about how that would feel.

Now imagine having that kind of relationship with every worker you interact with over the course of every day. Nobody has to be fake — or at least, not any faker than they’d be with you at a party. Nobody has to be work-fake, because none of them need your money. If they’re doing or making something for you, it’s because they want to.

I can name several dozen people in my friends list, right off the top of my head, who’d keep doing the general sort of work they’re doing right now, no matter how much money they made — except that they’d do it bigger, better, more efficiently and with more personal passion. Maybe you can say the same for interior decorators, woodworkers, architects, pharmacists, teachers and college quarterbacks you know.

And what about you?

Because I’ll tell you one thing. I don’t get paid a cent for these Medium posts. And if I had a billion dollars, I’d still be writing every day.