"Dirty" jobs being paid more certainly does sound a little more ethical than today, where those with little options have to work those dirty jobs to keep their house and to eat, and they are paid low.
Labor supply = Labor servicing consumption + labor servicing investment
Rearranging this implies:
Labor providing investment = labor supplied - labor providing consumption
Simple arithmetic shows we now have less resources devoted to investment. So how will this innovation actually occur? I realize demand for it might go up, but if supply doesn't increase correspondingly, so what?
That's a natty turn of phrase but I'm calling bullshit.
Rich people invest with the excess financial wealth they have after they've consumed hugely more than a poor person.
Give me more money and I can afford to eat better (reduced healthcare burden), can repair my house (reducing total resources needed over the lifetime of the building; and again there are health implications). Give that money to someone rich and yes, they will invest - sucking more value away from the populous without producing more value - but they'll also do things like buying a private jet which consumes/pollutes hugely and wastes resources.
Perhaps some of the wealthy won't be able to have private islands and maintain their more liquid assets, for shame.
Why not cooperatives and micro-investment? Why does a rich capitalist have to be the investor and suck all the value from the system?
There is no particular reason investment has to come from rich people. That's just how western economies seem to work. As I noted, in Namibia, poor people do seem to invest new wealth.
Redistributing this would allow poorer people opportunity to take part in investment which in turn should lead to more redistribution.
Tax increases for the rich in recession would (with a similarly naive analysis to the one you proffered) reduce the tax burden on the poor and allow then to become richer, increasing their consumption. Millions can buy a new TV instead of one person getting a yacht.
You just twisted my words and acted disingenuously.
I said, for the third time, the rich consume. The rich consume far more than the poor. The rich invest more than the poor, but that's because the poor don't have money to invest. Take all the money from the rich and give it to the poor and consumption and investment will shift. The people holding the money aren't as special as capitalism would have us assume.
You are unfortunately in the situation that the stated reasons for your preferred policies contradict each other. That's quite strange - it's almost as if those stated reasons are post-hoc justifications and not your real motivation.
Basic Income makes "vote with your wallet" a meaningful concept, instead of a hollow joke.
Most developed countries have unemployment permanently somewhere between 5-10% or even more during recession. Some, like Spain, have closer to 25%. Reducing labor supply may be the only answer.
It's not that I don't agree with you in principle. But you can only gain productivity if there are things for people to do. The fact of modern society is that we are running out of jobs.
There are lost of things to do. We have a situation of labor scarcity, not a surplus.
Complaining about a labor surplus right now is like a 350lb man eating french fries on the theory that he might starve in the future.
Some jobs aren't paid enough for people to do and still afford to live. Basic income actually fixes that by giving people a baseline to live off, upon which their salary can build.
A much better solution than BI would be a guaranteed job and/or an expanded EITC. These solutions - while not sounding as cool and hipster as BI - have no labor disincentive and cost a lot less.
India is filled with a ton of misery. It's the only country in the world where I saw dead people just lying in the gutter. The Mumbai slum was one of the worst places I've ever been and you want to hold that up as some sort of ideal? That people should just live down to that level instead of striving for better? If it wasn't for the Indian government welfare programs, that slum would be filled with rotting corpses.
You seem to think I'm endorsing having very few goods and services. I'm not. On the contrary, I oppose policies like BI which will reduce goods and services available.
Humans are needed to actually invent those innovative things. But in the BI world, we have fewer humans actually devoting their time to this. (See simple arithmetic above.)
Certainly the latter can enable the former, but the point made above is that Basic Income can do that as well.