>Who says your job can't be something you enjoy

This is unrealistic. Do you think an economy can survive with everyone doing what they enjoy? Do we have enough people who enjoy cleaning toilets, stocking shelves, and all the other menial, labor intensive jobs? This notion is a utopian, post currency (Star Trek Economy) fantasy.

Nobody is saying that we should expect our jobs to fill us with orgasmic ecstasy every minute we're on the clock; we're saying that if every day you come home from your job and think about ramming an icepick up your nose, then this is just possibly a sign it's a time to get a resume together.

I'm tired of the argument made implicitly all the time -- and explicitly on occasion -- that even if a job fills you with suicidal misery every day, if you're making enough to cover all your living expenses plus pay for the alcohol and pills to numb the pain, then by God you should just count yourself lucky, sit down and shut up. A given percentage of the workforce may indeed always hate their job -- but no, in fact, I do not believe that the economy will collapse if that percentage decreases.

I'll chime in because I always hear this argument and I don't see it as a particularly good one.

Take cleaning toilets, for example. If no one wants to do it then it will become more expensive to find people to do it. That will drive others to come up with an automated solution to the problem that, while expensive, will be cheaper than paying someone to do it. Eventually someone will come up with a solution that maybe wasn't even considered before, like self-cleaning toilets or something.

Now everyone is better off (toilets are clean and no one needs to clean them), because people were free to do what they enjoy.

This is why I believe in basic income, where people don't need to clean toilets for a living, and the actual issue of "how do we, as a society, get clean toilets, without submitting anyone to the awful task of cleaning them?" comes up for debate. Right now we don't talk about it because our system makes some people's livelihoods depend on their cleaning toilets, so they have to do it for the benefit of others, even though they'd rather do something else. Basic income is a very efficient way to force those problems to be solved, via the ingenuity of those that like problem-solving (entrepreneurs), because it makes it so that it's less likely that you can force someone to work doing something they'd rather not do.

That's just how I understand it.

> people don't need to clean toilets for a living,

I swear to you, our janitor is the happiest, hardest working person in the building. Everyone looks up to him. But I can totally see where he couldn't work at McDonald's, let alone do QA runs on lab systems (a lab tech's job), or diagnose disease. And I think a genuine source of his happiness is having a job. Basic income doesn't solve the problem of feeling valued.

Cleaning toilets isn't that bad. At the very least, it is always meaningful.

>Take cleaning toilets, for example. If no one wants to do it then it will become more expensive to find people to do it.

IMO Here is the problem with what you are saying. Who actually cleans toilets today? Immigrants (largely illegal ones). This is just like the goods we import from China. There is a slave class of people who clean toilets and work in Chinese factories. I agree with the economic principles where innovation will drive improvement, but illegal immigration and free trade interfere with this.

I hope that basic income passes in Norway. It would be quite interesting to see what happens.