Give a man free fish ... soon he will be bored and will choose to pay for them!

With the exception of people like my super-wealthy gazillionaire friend (haha!) or people like me who, according to my neighbor, never works for a living, most dread the weekdays and look forward to weekends and holidays.

We are a strange species.  We bring all the trouble of work on ourselves and then dream about not having to work.  We chain ourselves, put a lock on it and throw the key away, and then dream of being free at least every two days of the week.

Some of the most free people that I have met in my life were in the villages like Pattamadai and Sengottai.  Seemingly in sync with the hot temperature conditions, where even a brisk walk can tire a person, there was a whole lot of doing nothing.  We folks from urban and industrial areas, having been used to working in order to earn the privilege of sitting around twice a week, found that kind of a rustic life to be dull and boring and even labeled them as lazy for not doing anything.

The older I get, the less clear I am on who is really free.

We dream of a future, made possible by science and technology, when we won't have to work at all.  Robots that clean the homes. Ready-to-consume nutritious food in full and plenty (even if it will be in unrecognizable forms to us in the present.)  A future in which even firefighters won't have any work because nothing synthetic will ever crash or burn thanks to advancements in science and technology.   In that future, we will have all the free time in the world.  Or, at least, more weekends than weekdays.

When students complain about income inequality and unemployment--about which I have been worried for a long time, evidenced by the number of blog posts on those issues--sometimes I have thrown at them a different scenario to think about.  What if those profiting from automation and outsourcing agreed to guarantee every American an income that will be at higher-than-poverty level, and they can work and earn more if they chose to?  The possibility of a permanent vacation. Every day will be a weekend. A Sengottai/Pattamadai life of minimal work.

Almost always, students do not like that idea.  Sitting around, or even standing around in a museum, doing nothing can become a bore.  Fishing is fun when you do it once in a while, but not day in day out.  Or, given the Puritanical streak, some see the virtue in working as a means of not merely earning a livelihood but about feeling good about oneself and the path to god and heaven.

Of course, that guaranteed minimum income is only a thought experiment.  But, I am not the only one who has been thinking like that--I am merely an insignificant person to think about it ;)

A simple idea for eliminating poverty is garnering greater attention in recent weeks: automatically have the government give every adult a basic income.
The Atlantic's Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker brought up the idea a few weeks ago when they contemplated cutting poverty in half, and Annie Lowrey revisited it in today's issue of the New York Times Magazine.

See, there are quite a few of us loons out there!

Why are we even constructing such thought experiments?  Because it makes things simpler at one level:

a minimum income would also allow us to eliminate every government benefit as well. Get rid of SNAP, TANF, housing vouchers, the Earned Income tax credit and many others. Get rid of them all. A 2012 Congressional Research Service report found that the federal government spends approximately $750 billion each year on benefits for low-income Americans and that rises to a clean trillion when you factor in state programs. Eliminate all of those and the net figure comes out to $1.2 trillion needed to pay for a universal basic income, still a hefty sum.

Interesting, right?  I tell ya, this thinking business is a whole lot of entertainment that no amount of sports and movies can equal ;)

Of course, with a Congress that can't even figure out what color toilet paper to use, such radical approaches will forever remain only as thought experiments.  It does not mean that there are no attempts--they are not here in the US though!

Switzerland’s citizens will soon vote on a referendum to give each working-age adult in Switzerland a basic income of $2,800 (2,500 francs) per month.

We are living in some interesting times.

A couple of miles outside Sengottai