Would you prefer they die? You do realize automation will soon ensure there simply isn't enough work to go around?
> Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV
Because it'll keep society from crumbling.
When I get home, their TV is still on and the other people in my building and I are exhausted from working and finally get some time for recreation, usually in the dark. The other neighbors say the across-the-street people are selling opiates. They should be made to do something in return for their government money: anything useful around town like cleaning up, repainting signs, babysitting- not just getting free government money to capitalize their opiate sales.
I love my job, but not enough that I would come here everyday first thing in the morning if I weren't being paid. That's why the Wikipedia example mentioned in the article is a _terrible_ counterexample for OP's point. First, Wikipedia is a _clone_, not an original work. Second, it's billions of micro-contributions, not people working 40-45 hours per week like the others in my building and myself. No one is that motivated. As posted yesterday, the theory of the Tyranny of Structurelessness is real. Only a small portion of society functions without leaders. And I admit that I am not one of its leaders (yet!), but I am comfortable for the most getting led toward productive efforts.
That's why I believe poverty is a failure of leadership. It's the inability or disinclination of leaders to herd those people into something useful. It's cheaper to pay them to stay home. It's got nothing to do with them being lazy, as someone else wrote. MOST of us are lazy, not merely the unemployed.
Sounds like you're just envious that the entrepreneurs across the street are more successful than you.
To turn this question around, why do we want only slaves to live comfortably, while denying this right to people who are free?
Yes, slaves. Our culture, out of necessity, managed to successfully hide this fact from most of the people, that we are all slaves. We need to work, or else we starve. Some of us are lucky and do the things they would have done anyway living free, but for most of us, it's just global slavery we're in denial with.
Automation may finally free us all, and this is the point most people (suprisingly, even here on HN) seem to fail to understand.