The Right to Play Video Games All Day Long

I previously remarked that the right to live that a Universal Basic Income would make materially meaningful would necessarily include the right to live in ways other than many of those prescribed by cultural traditionalists--for example, young people staying in mom's basement playing video games all day rather than going and getting a job. Indeed, considering the case of the UBI-subsidized gamer I specifically pointed out that besides their having the right to live in that manner, those who might be discomfited by the notion of their doing so may do well to consider how preferable this would be to the ways in which people get into trouble; that even those who may seem to be in this way "contributing nothing to society" may at least be costing society far less than those who are falsely thought to be contributing, such as investment bankers both in their personal consumption, and the consequences of their often useless or pernicious work activity (yes, I am flatly saying that according to the available data if society traded one investment banker for one gamer, maybe one investment banker for ten gamers, we would be coming out ahead given what investment bankers actually do); and that contrary to the vicious stereotypes the young person living at home is actually likely to be making a contribution to their household of some kind, not just with whatever income they have to a household budget that often needs the support (which UBI would certainly enable), but in ways that often do not register in Gross Domestic Product but are nonetheless genuinely valuable, like being helpmeets or even carers to parents or other relatives (just as much that does register in the GDP as "growth" may be worthless). The result is that not only would any respect for freedom require tolerating the likelihood of some, perhaps many, young people electing to use UBI to do this out of respect for freedom, but one has reason not to worry overmuch about the loss to society represented in their choice--especially in a context where, as is already so frequently the case with even young college graduates in the fields we are told are "in demand," their labor is really not wanted, certainly not wanted enough for anyone to pay them a living wage for it. Indeed, past a certain point the expectation that they go on looking for a taker for it, begging someone to let them make a profit for them, is nothing but doctrinaire insistence on mindless conformism, extreme callousness, and even sadism of the kind that makes the belief in "prescription" so often go hand in hand with admiration and apologia for "injustice, misery and brutality." Reflecting on the prejudices of such--alas, the makers of the conventional wisdom of our time--it seems striking that where they are so quick to demand that people of more egalitarian sensibility stomach much that they find unpalatable in the name of "freedom" they are unwilling to do the same when an even more robust argument on these grounds happen to run up against the demands of the unthinking traditionalism for which they stand.