the state will literally show up with police and guns if I went out into the mountains and lived off the land
Why? Is it someone else's land that you're trespassing on, using up their resources, hunting their animals, etc?
Shall all of us who don't feel fulfilled do the same thing as you propose? When you hurt yourself and get an infection, are you going to crawl back out of the woods and expect there to still be other people to care for you, supply your antibiotic, and yes, clean your bedpan while you recover? What right to you have to expect the bedpan cleaner to serve you?
unless I want to starve I must work.
Who do you expect to plant, harvest, and distribute the food you want to eat?
When you want something from someone - food, medicine, etc. - you're going to have to offer something in return, else why should they provide it? For almost all of us, our labor is the product we can offer in trade. Only by all of us making this tradeoff does society survive.
What if the value of someone's labour is not enough for the things they need to survive?
Sure, we can make a moral argument about that. But that's not what this branch of the debate is about. We were debating the proposition that "money itself tends to disincentivise work for a lot of people" and employment is force.
But since you bring it up, my biggest concern about BI is along the same lines as your moral question. Suppose that every year we hand out $X,000 to each person. Some people are going to waste that on booze, gambling, etc., and still be left with nothing to eat. What's our moral obligation to those people?
> Why? Is it someone else's land that you're trespassing on, using up their resources, hunting their animals, etc?
Yeah. Just about every bit of land is owned by someone. In order to have my own land to live off of I need to produce some income to pay property taxes, lest the state confiscate it from me.
And it's not a question of 1% owning "too much", either. A hunter-gatherer life is hideously inefficient. There isn't enough land on Earth to support even a small fraction of the population living this way.
Why? Is it someone else's land that you're trespassing on, using up their resources, hunting their animals, etc?
Shall all of us who don't feel fulfilled do the same thing as you propose? When you hurt yourself and get an infection, are you going to crawl back out of the woods and expect there to still be other people to care for you, supply your antibiotic, and yes, clean your bedpan while you recover? What right to you have to expect the bedpan cleaner to serve you?
unless I want to starve I must work.
Who do you expect to plant, harvest, and distribute the food you want to eat?
When you want something from someone - food, medicine, etc. - you're going to have to offer something in return, else why should they provide it? For almost all of us, our labor is the product we can offer in trade. Only by all of us making this tradeoff does society survive.