Universal Basic Income, what to do with your spare time.

An opinion piece in today's Dominion Post by Gwynne Dyer about Universal Basic Income raised some challenging questions. Paying a wage to people who are not in paid employment goes against the deeply ingrained Protestant culture and values. There is no problem with people making money from land speculation without working for it, see the opinion piece about High Country land tenure, there is no problem with people making a mint out of speculating in shares or property, but to pay everybody a living wage so that they could live in dignity, whether in employment or unemployed goes against the grain. Yet unemployment is a feature of the global capitalist economy. It is also a product of technology, automation. No matter what Trump says, the jobs he wants to bring back to America no longer exist, and both he and the people who voted for him know this. There is a permanent divide between those who are fortunate to have a job and those who are thrown on the job scrap heap. However paying everyone enough to live on raises the question of what would people do who have no paid job. How would they use their leisure. The wealthy, who have spare disposable income, learned how to enjoy their leisure, but the working man, not used to leisure, whose whole life centred around his work, would have to learn what to do with spare time. The elderly, the retired, who live on their pension, have a lot to teach them. Those over 60 or may be 65, have the remaining possibly as much as the third of their lives to fill in. They take up hobbies, interests, and feel no guilt for not working, or at least not working for money. Society would also have to address the role of money and such institutions as continuing education, fitness programmes, broadcasting, television, the internet and libraries. In our present state of libertarian capitalist thinking we lose sight of these, that the air waves are not there to be exploited for advertising and money, but for public education and enjoyment, that Facebook and other similar programmes are there to bring people together, to communicate with others, not to generate profit for those who gained a monopoly over these facilities. These are big challenges for the future, yet curiously, none of the political parties are interesting in confronting them.