Perhaps not Protestant but Calvinist. That it is work which is the thing that must be done. We must work, that is, for the good of our souls:

Unleash us from the “tyranny” of work and we are likely to feel the tyranny of inactivity more heavily. When the coal-mining and fishing industries collapsed the loss went far beyond financial pain; whole communities were denuded of identity and purpose. As Musk has admitted of technological unemployment and the limitations of UBI, “If there’s no need for your labour, what’s your meaning? Do you feel useless? That’s a much harder problem to deal with.”

Can you feel it? That burn as the absence of wage slavery diminishes our sense of self worth? It’s being put forward as the reason why we shouldn’t have a universal basic income. About which there are a couple of possible comments.

The first and most obvious being that it’s an idea being put forward, often enough, by those who do not need to work by hand or brow to put the calories on the dinner table. Who have, themselves, found something to occupy their time even as the essential basics are paid for in other ways. That is, those who do not have to work for a basic income are postulating that if other people didn’t have to then, well, they’d not be like those who currently don’t have to. Oi, the polloi won’t do like what we do sort of thing.

The second and rather more important being that we’ve already got a basic income guarantee in this country. It’s called the welfare state. Whether you bother to work or not there will be education for the kids, health care for everyone, a roof over the head (absent those mental health and addiction problems that so plague the rough sleepers at least) and so on. There will even be some modest amount of cash to aid in moving life along. It might not be all that much but it is there.

If you like, we’ve already sold the pass that there is that basic income. Now we’re only arguing about the form of it. The current system is conditional which has its inefficiencies, not least the immense tax and benefit withdrawal rate faced by those just climbing up out of poverty. The universal basic income rather neatly solves that. It is more efficient that is.

We like economic efficiency around here because it means that, by definition, we’re richer in aggregate by doing things that efficient way. This over and above our refusal to believe that work is what defines us. To insist so is, clearly, most illiberal for it implies that the dunnykin diver is of less moral worth than the nurse, or the newspaper columnist, which isn’t part of our vision of the good society at all.