Taking Up Animation as a Hobby

Your not-so-subtle intimation that people who want basic income are amoral is both offensive on its face and ignorant of reality. There are many, many people who are trapped in difficult, dangerous, unpleasant, or insufficient jobs for a variety of reasons and circumstances. Basic income - while complicated to implement certainly - is not about allowing us all to live a life of dotage. It's about freeing people from having to dedicate their entire lives enriching a wealthy investor, just so they can put food on the table and a roof overhead.

Work is not a valued goal in-and-of-itself. Work is just whatever it is that you do with your life. Some people are fortunate enough to make their work something they enjoy. Many are not. The Biblical perspective of "humans being made for work" doesn't mean that you must experience a visceral sensation of toil and hardship in order for it to qualify as work, it just means God made us able to experience boredom. It seems you have missed the context of the quote you pulled from Ecclesiastes. That section of Chapter 2 is in fact about the futility of making labor and work the value of your life, not about the government taking away hard-won rewards of labor and redistributing wealth.

Chapter 2 of Ecclesiastes compares a life of both pure leisure and pure labor, and declares both to be futile. The exact quote you pull about leaving all you own to another who has not toiled for it has no bearing on the question of basic income, because the author is only bemoaning the fact that regardless of how hard you work in your life, you die at the end and lose it. Where it goes is immaterial - the phrase about leaving it to someone who hasn't toiled for it is a rhetorical device to emphasize the futility of the labor, not a condemnation of welfare.

There are many other places in the Bible, both OT and NT, that describe methods and justifications for caring for the poor and destitute. While it's true that a strict "rich people" personal tax would not be enough to pay the salaries of everyone in the country in a strict mathematical sense, you are conveniently leaving out the fact that existing welfare and social security alone add up to over $2T. Evaded taxes and a tax on the %0.01 bring that number to around $2.5T, which divided among Americans over 18 is roughly $10k per year, which is close to what basic income would look like. The money is there.

And $10k per year, like all basic income schemes, isn't meant to let us lounge by a pool all day. It's merely meant to allow Americans to work where they want by freeing them from destitution and being chained to a low-wage job. When you don't have to work 60 hours a week at two part-time jobs just to make ends meet, then you can focus on studying or apprenticing at a job you actually WANT. Which in nearly all studies of direct cash payments and basic income experiments, is exactly what happens. When poor and working people get a reasonable amount of direct cash, it almost always goes straight into bills, food, and education.

I also would like to question your intimation from your higher comment that the only valid projects are

> "good risk-adjusted investments, producing measurable returns and not merely misty-eyed wish fulfillment"

Remember that we serve God and not Mammon. Framing the value of human work only in terms of its economic return is dangerously close to reducing the value of a human to their contribution to GDP.

> According to me.

> I could probably go on, but that would be gratuitous

This is a problem for your argument. You could go on indefinitely, but it would never move your argument forward by a non-zero value. Are you familiar with "is vs ought"?

In AI research we know that an AI can accumulate many "is" forms of intelligence, like "the car is red", or whatever. Other "is" conclusions can be derived from the existing collection of "is" assumptions.

But an "ought" can not be derived from "is" statements. An "ought" can only be justified if you assume some prior "ought", which is a non-trivial problem for AI, and for people making claims about what someone else ought to do.

So you can't say it "is" hot outside, so therefore I "ought" to drink some water, unless you assume some prior "ought". Like, "you ought to not want to die of dehydration, and it is hot outside, therefore you ought to drink some water". But should I ought to not want to die of dehydration? Maybe, but only if you assume another ought.

Your ought claim about what people should do if they are capable depends on other people's opinions about what ought to be, whether it's what "educated people" think ought to be, or what "moral people" think ought to be, or what King Solomon said ought to be. But those are all arbitrary opinions, which can't be justified without assuming additional arbitrary opinions.

It's ought all the way down. Meaning, each person has to decide what's important to them, and it ends up being rather arbitrary in the end.