Even if UBI is 5 thousand dollars a month for example, still the minimum wage being a living wage on its own without being added to any other source of income would make your job significantly add to your income enough to motivate you to do it not out of survival necessity.

If UBI covers the basic costs of living there would be no reason to exert the same effort you were forced to in the past out of survival necessity only to just earn an extra 600 bucks to your monthly income. This would mean that you are stuck with UBI as your maximum, and you’ll always be too poor to do what you really want aside from just buying the minimum stuff that UBI gives you the chance to afford.

It won’t be worth it to work for a job with the current low minimum wage, with or without UBI. What I’m trying to show you here is that it would be even more depressing to accept any of these same jobs with the same minimum wage you earn from them that is still below a decent acceptable living wage. It’s not a matter of being in shortage of money here. It’s a matter of not being able to expand your income or earn any more money except by working all the time just to earn a few extra pennies that comprise only about fifth of your current income or expenses instead of 100 percent of your current income or expenses. It’s about why bother working all this just to earn an extra 700 bucks over what I already get from UBI when I can just chill and get 90 percent of my income without exerting any effort and while owning my own time and retaining my sense of free will. I’ll get by with less. We don’t want that to happen. We want people to get something out of any job they apply for right now other than their mere survival expenses, because when these expenses get covered through UBI, they would still find a strong motivating reason to get a job. Not everyone who gets a job wants it because it’s fulfilling for them. The overwhelming majority of people are employees because it is the only way they can make money. If we do not give them enough money through whatever job they happened to have or be stuck with, they would find no reason to keep doing this job. In general, people don’t like to work at all, even if they love that kind of work and would happily do it for free. Normal people just want to chill. We shouldn’t deny them that luxury. We would only make it so that it becomes something like if you want to just chill 24/7, you can. But if you’re ambitious, there’s a way to become rich enough to enjoy what you want to do in life that’s expensive or doesn’t come for free, and that is through getting a job. We cannot expect everyone to be able to start their own business, even if they were so sincere about their desire to become rich. We have to provide them with alternate pathways to becoming rich enough to enjoy themselves, and live their lives to the fullest all they want, the way they want to, and these pathways should include the option of reaching so through getting a job. If jobs don’t give us anything that makes it doesn’t sound so appealing to happily live at the mediocre level a UBI can guarantee us, then a lot of people wouldn’t want to work any job they don’t extremely love and believe in, and it is rare for the majority of people to find a job that they really love, believe in, and would happily enjoy doing even for free, which means that most people would not accept jobs that the economy needs or depends on, at least in terms of production and maintenance of the supply chain. If we make such essential and even non-essential jobs worth their while, or worth the effort the employees put into them, by making these jobs pay them well or highly enough, then they won’t hesitate to take them, because getting a job with such a high salary would provide them with a pathway to lead a better life in terms of financial prosperity. That would make it so that UBI does not become a reason for people to lie on the beach and smoke weed all day long.

The problem is with being out of options in case you wanted to raise your financial standard of living. Any job that you’d get to increase your income would make no difference with or without UBI, if the minimum wage is not a living wage on its own without adding UBI to it.

You can’t become a multi millionaire through any kind of job in the current system, except if you’re a CEO…etc. I’m not trying to say that a high UBI is bad or would deter people from the desire to want to make more money. I am saying that both UBI and raising the minimum wage to a living wage should be implemented.

If no job available to you meets the minimum amount of money that would make a difference in your life, and you got the survival expenses covered by UBI, then why get a job in this case? How many people have a passion they are willing to do even for free?

But if the minimum wage isolated is a living wage, it would still be rewarding and worth it enough for the average working class employee to bother getting a job to increase their income under UBI.

And we want to encourage the average employee to keep working and being productive without being abused to keep the supply chain abundant.

Yes, we can always organize worker strikes and demand a bigger salary for all the employees in a given company, but what happens when they tell us all to leave? That is the problem here. They don’t care about us. We’re disposable to them. Unless the government forces them to pay more, we will always be in the weaker negotiating position. We simply don’t have any leverage to negotiate with.

Anyone who is looking for a job is desperate to get one. Either you really want the job or you’d just go have fun. If you want the job then you’re desperate. If you’re not desperate then why bother doing the same things every day that you don’t believe in or care about, perhaps even hate, if you’re not desperate?

Since you are not in the strong negotiating position here then you’d have to accept the low salary job whether you like it or not because there’s no way for you to add something to your UBI income except that. So they will still be in control of your decision making process, and free will would still be an illusion in your case.

In this case, if you have no choice but to get a job to increase your income above the level of what UBI provides you with on a regular basis, it would be great if this extra stream of income coming from your job adds a substantial amount of money to your monthly income.

Hence making the minimum wage being a living wage not entirely a useless or redundant proposal, if you’re pro the working class doing well financially.

Still if you’re serious about doing what you love, you gotta provide the adult part of your brain that seeks comfort and stability with a reason to shut up and stop calling you irresponsible for pursuing what you love.

And this will happen easier if you earn enough money from doing what you love instead of sacrificing financial well-being for doing what you love or believe in.

We shouldn’t rely on the kindness of any random non governmental entity to be the only possible option for you to lead a decent life.

The minimum salary under the current system won’t remain being motivating enough for desperate people to accept any job anyway because they have no choice. In the past they did it because there was no alternative route to making money available to them.

But with UBI being that high, they’d rather remain that poor (with what UBI provides them being their maximum income) but free and getting by with UBI alone instead of doing a job they hate that makes no contribution to their income that is big enough to alleviate their financial struggles.

If you can afford food under UBI but not a Spotify subscription for example, you will have aspirations that would make you want to work to be able to afford to reach or pay for them someday.

If no job makes that possible, you’d be stuck – like capped – at the UBI level of financial security without being able to raise your financial status or level above that which the decent UBI would grant you.

You will get the 2k+ UBI but it would be impossible for you to earn like 500 extra bucks except by working 40+ hours a week. Why would anyone do that?

So they’d rather suck it up and remain poor, instead of getting a job, because the amount of effort they exert all month long just accounts for like one fifth of their monthly income, not 100 percent of their monthly income, which means it wouldn’t be motivating enough for them to go through all the struggle of a daily job they don’t necessarily love, or simply not worth the effort, and thus they’d be stuck for good at the poverty level that the UBI government checks guarantee they won’t fall under.