A Basic Income Would Upend America’s Work Ethic—and That’s a Good Thing

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Simply put, wage work has become one of the most elemental pillars of our civic religion. It is not just an American religion, although Americans tend to be especially fierce devotees, but virtually a world religion. Remember the myth of the Garden of Eden, shared by all the Abrahamic creeds, Christian and Muslim and Jewish traditions alike. Once upon a time, the story goes, God was generous. He created Adam and Eve and gave them a garden of plenty in which to live. But although there were many trees with many fruits, they were tempted by the serpent and disobeyed God’s warning not to bite into the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For this sin they were cast out of the garden and made to struggle for their subsistence. They had sinned, and so ever after they were made to work for their livelihood. Work is our punishment, the story goes, and our redemption.

The myth explained the harsh reality of life for people who struggled over the millennia to survive in a subsistence economy. But the myth was also put to the service of dominant groups who wrested control of the fields, the forests, and the streams on which subsistence depended and then blamed the ensuing poverty on the poor themselves. Over time, many of the world’s people were not only cursed by the need to work; they also had to work for those who controlled the resources that turned labor into subsistence. They became workers for hire by the propertied, and the drudgery and the abuses of wage work now became the fate to which humankind was consigned for the sin in the Garden of Eden.

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Could it be that people are afraid of being freed from wage work, even from a portion of wage work? What would they do with their newfound free time? Watch television or play with their iPhone? A shorter work week, or no work week would make a rich leisure life possible, and it would make a dense social life possible. There would be time to invest in our communities, and time to care for one another, and especially to care for the young, the old, and the sick. But if the patterns of that leisure, the elements of that community, have become invisible to us, well, maybe everyone might as well go to work for whatever camaraderie the workplace provides.

These fears are another reason that the debate over basic income has such extraordinary political potential. It is not just another reform; it is a proposal that makes us think about what it is we are here on earth to do. Both our civic religion and harsh economic necessity dictates that we must work in order to live—how else are we going to pay off those student loans? But when a tiny population of farmers can feed many millions and highly automated factories can churn out more cars and more consumer goods than people can afford to buy, what is the point of the tyranny of wage labor? And what precisely is the justification for the huge gap between the ostentatious wealth of the billionaires and the misery of those who can find only the most degraded forms of work? Basic income raises the big questions—what is an economy for, and why can’t we have one that serves the needs of everyone?