It also makes a huge difference if the startup is your primary source of income or not. My wife worked for several startups, all of which failed. But since I had a more stable paycheck, it wasn't so bad, and we just treated the extra startup income as a bonus, and had very low expectations on cashing in on the equity.
UBI is not about working on any hobby you want. It’s about redistributing wealth so that people can negotiate for more of the pie since the current system relies on using the cumulative wealth of one’s ancestors to determine their bargaining power.
At least you're candid that it's about taking money from people against their will. Most advocates couch UBI in terms like unleashing individual creativity and things like that.
I’m also candid about my current lifestyle being based on taking things from people against their will.
Their will probably was not to pick strawberries in a foreign nation or clean beers spilled surfaces at 11pm or not being able to breastfeed their infant because they need to go slap hamburgers together for $15 an hour.
I assume not all of those people willingly got drunk and high and got caught engaging in crime in their teens and 20s and willingly threw away their economic opportunities.
Problem is, how do you support this? You must have made a lot of money to both (a) support your family, and (b) pay for the childcare that your wife would have been too busy to help very much with. Either that, or you lived in a low cost of living area and were able to do some kind of price/salary arbitrage. And if the solution was "make a lot of money", then that again makes childcare doubly important, because if you also were focusing on work, then you wouldn't have had much time to raise your kids either. Right?
Ah. I've left out the obvious option: You don't have kids, and don't plan to?
I bring this up not to be snarky but because this feels like a very real Catch-22.
(Deleted weird coda with mythological references and stuff.)
Why do you assume they have children? Not everyone choose to have children and frankly, that's a great decision. I'm a parent but I subscribe to the feeling that instead of assuming everyone has/wants kids, we should praise people who don't.
I started out assuming they had kids, but I did catch myself:
> Ah. I've left out the obvious option: You don't have kids, and don't plan to?
Yes, that's their business.
My problem isn't with their personal decision per-se. It's that today's myths ("the glorious and independent startup founder") encourage people to make sacrifices that they may not think about until it's too late. I think most people who chase the startup dream will regret it. I also think that there are other people, not founders on average, who benefit from these myths. So they should be treated with suspicion.
Children are a public good that funds everyone's retirement, no matter your political system and the people who don't have kids are basically free riders in the end.
In a libertarian perspective, the young create growth in the market that the ownership old use to fund their retirements, and in a socialist perspective, they create a tax base of income that the government uses to fund the retirements of the old.
