Comment by techdmn

This is a fantastic question.

In nature, every individual has to fight for survival. The strong eat the weak, there is no justice, only a fight to survive.

Civilized society, in my opinion at least, aspires to be something else, something more. There should be justice. We should not impose on the rights of others without due cause.

Currently, as your question points out, we rely on keeping people desperate enough to do uncomfortable jobs for little pay in order to survive. Our economic polices in the U.S. deliberately keep some percentage of the population desperate, whether that's targeting a 4% unemployment rate, keeping a rock bottom minimum wage, trade policy, healthcare policy, I could go on all day.

What if society didn't function this way? What if the wealth that already exists were distributed in a way that people were not desperate just to survive? One mechanism might be a UBI that was sufficient for bare-minimum housing and food costs. Then we'd have to pay people enough that it was worth their time to do those jobs. Goods and services, especially those currently underpaid, would be more expensive. But the people working those jobs would have a lot more income, which would be spent and re-injected into the economy, probably the local economy. I believe that would tend to bubble up the chain - Why should I deal with all the stress of project deadlines if I could check groceries for a similar paycheck? Things would cost more, but we would also be paid more.

Ultimately I think the goal would be a more equitable distribution of wealth. The counter-argument I usually see is that wealthy individuals have created the wealth they have, and have a right to it. I would disagree, pointing to the same policies above that depress wages and encourage people to take poorly paying jobs.