Why do we assume everyone should be working?

In Belgium they make "Living Wage" extremely unattractive by having a LOT of extra conditions associated with it. In other words: a number of people at least as large as the number getting leefloon choose to instead do with nothing (and not pay rent, and steal, and ...)

Why? A few conditions to getting leefloon:

1) you have to rent (officially) and pay your rent (we'll start of easy)

2) you do not get enough money to pay rent in any of the big cities. Oh and the city and police will hate you since OCMW eats out of their budgets

The amount depends on your circumstances, but minimum wage in Belgium (which you won't get on "interim" jobs, btw) is 2200 (after tax).

Leefloon is: 800 if sharing an apartment, 1300 if you live by yourself, 1800 if you provide for at least one child.

3) you must give FULL insight to all your finances to the OCMW. If you have savings you are not eligible (and if you don't they can reclaim up to 10 years of benefits)

If you own a house you have to sell that and live off the proceeds until they run out before you become eligible for leefloon.

4) you must give FULL insight to your entire situation to the OCMW. If you have any sort of support, even outside of the country, you are not eligible (standard 10 year ...)

5) you must be willing to work, unless you have a recent certification from a Belgian doctor that you are permanently unable to (and you have to get that again, at your expense, every year). Oh and you have to prove this, at minimum once per month, but usually once per year. Going to the OCMW, wait 2 hours, list, with proof, what you've done to get a job since last time

This includes working for free "for the community", which means for city hall.

Oh, there are now several ways for employers to pay you less than minimum wage, as well as make you pay for insurance ("interim" jobs) and you can't refuse those jobs if on leefloon

6) you must let the OCMW do a "social investigation" into you and your entire situation (your home, your friends, your family, ...). This also means you have to accept "social help" (which many people are unwilling to do because, well because it sucks). OCMW wants you to take drug treatment? You have to? OCMW wants you to learn a language course? You have to show up. OCMW wants you to take a plumber course? You have to.

7) you have to justify ALL your expenses (meaning you have to get receipts for everything, down to every drink you buy in the supermarket), and go over them on a monthly basis with an OCMW employee.

8) you're not allowed to do any kind of studying (and can't have done so in the last 2 years)

9) OCMW is known for being very unpleasant to work with, to the point they need police protection in a lot of places (certainly in cities)

This is VERY different from UBI. Very, very, very different.

The way to cheat the system is to "work", but be fake long term ill. You get a job, you get a doctor to declare you long term ill (you know, take drugs before you do or something) and they can't fire you for 2 years. This will generally pay between double and triple leefloon for as long as it lasts.

Needless to say, the government is in a fight with doctors. The government wants to set a quota on doctors for how many patients they can declare long-term ill. And doctors complain, first about patients that are long term ill and patients' existnece doesn't respect quotas, second about patients that threaten (and commit) violence unless they get their long-term-ill certification. Obviously government also demands doctors don't refuse patients and almost never gives any kind of protection even in hospitals (meaning hospitals have to provide private security which is fine for huge hospitals but a problem for small ones. Also, obviously, such security will not protect patients' rights against doctors).

Obviously employers don't want this, since the government has decided they're paying most of the wage in this case. This is so expensive, even just one long term ill employee can make a company go out of business, and even huge companies have a big burden of people who do this.

The number of ex-youth services kids (who were removed from their parents against their will) who have given this system as a reason for their suicide is in the double digits now.

Neither Belgium, nor the Netherlands, have anything remotely resembling UBI. And that people avoid this system has nothing to do with inherent willingness to work.

I also got out of the article that we shouldn't let people work who shouldn't work (the water as a resource vs labor as a resource comparison). That implies those people are provided for in a different way than wages.

It's a global thing; most of those countries look to immigration to solve their depopulation problem. Education needs to be global. I guess LLMs do that now in many ways; we don't necessarily need formal education systems everywhere. The issue with doing a local import of foreign immigrants is it only lasts one generation: when the next generation grow up poor but with local education, face the job market and comprehend how much it costs to have kids, they (generally, mostly, compared to their parents) decide not to. These issues tend to be systemic, and there's more of them: breakdown in community, normalization of corruption or self-interest and normalization of technocratic surveillance nanny statism seem to be definite parallel trends right now. They're not blame the immigrant type problems. They're inertia of capitalism meets waves of technology shift type problems.

Basically we should stop being assholes to people in poor countries and treat them as equals. This would go a long way to solving many problems in the world.

Because otherwise the question becomes: who decides who should be working and who should not?

Why you should not be working and i should?

> “So what happens is not _really_ unknown.”

I made a career change in my 40s into at a small (A guaranteed income _might_ have helped do this faster. The jobs I had (previous to now) directly lead me to cheap housing owned by that employer. My next 2 years were filled with labor abuse—long hours below minimum wage. But That community took care of its own. I don’t know how that scales up with everyone getting this Guaranteed Wage. Maybe this GW helps you rent at market rates, but I had some rent forbearance in the form of more abusive work in that little community. You can’t have that with government assistance. Work and housing at the bottom are precarious, and you need support which in my case came from the same private source.

I guess what I’m trying to get my head around is the idea government programs are inflationary but in a way that the underground economy are not.