Didn’t Nancy Pelosi once say something, about how being free from a job, enables people to be more creative, or something along those lines? The implication being, that being tied down by a job inhibits people??
I'm remembering it in regards to ObamaCare. Probably in not having to work to pay for medical care/insurance leaves artistes free to create, etc.
Yeah, that’s the fantasy driving UBI: that people, freed from the existential imperative of earning a poverty-level income, they’ll take classes to better their career prospects, create artwork, volunteer more, and otherwise be Good People™ - productivity without incentive. Leftists view low-income work as a trap, too much effort for too little results leading to no time/energy to better themselves.
What they absolutely refuse to consider (other than flippantly as unlikely/rare) is that a significant # of poor are such precisely because they have no personal motivation - so giving them a poverty-level income for free merely gives them more time to lounge, eat, and procreate.
They also refuse to consider the productive reality of people doing “nice things” (art, volunteering, yoga, etc) just doesn’t build homes, feed people, cure diseases, etc. They reject the core of capitalism: a thing only has value when another is willing to trade for it ... meaning that if someone is doing something which others will _not_ trade for, it does not have value.
Further, they do not comprehend value as fragile: giving someone $1 of food to consume means that $1 literally turns to $#!^ plus a few hours of energy which becomes worthless if not productively expended.
So yes, Pelosi et al believe most people working at jobs are “inhibited” precisely because they have to work for a meager $X/hr, and because they can’t afford an income gap they can’t afford the cost of bridging (training, moving, job search, etc) to a better work position. Being socialists, their solution is to just throw other people’s money at the designated victims, and tired of having to actually think about solutions they jump at the notion of just giving a poverty-level income to everyone (”hey, that was easy!”) and expect the ills of capitalism to evaporate. ...while nobody has an actual incentive to work (hey, I’d seriously consider moving to the country, slashing my spending, and living off the land+UBI).