If you have tremendous productivity in a small portion of your society, it is absolutely sustainable to subsidize the rest of the population on monthly checks. If someone is making 10,000% profit (and completely automated production drives costs to just upfront purchase and maintenance) that profit can provide for millions without them having to work.
I think it is a cultural scar that everyone is expected to spend 1/3 their week laboring for someone else (most of the time). If that labor doesn't produce real value (and a lot of the US jobs market is artificial middle men rendered obsolete by pervasive instantaneous international communication of information) you are just wasting peoples time having them drain their energy and time in a fruitless job, where they might (you never know) take their free time and initiative spent on petty labor and produce miraculous things like new inventions or art or community service.
No, it's not. There is no tremendously productive part of society that generates 10,000% profit. There is a shrinking middle class paying welfare.
And no, people are not going to innovate anything if they are getting taken care of. Entrepreneurship thrives in unregulated environment, which France is obviously not. I mean...you can't even work legally more than 35 hours there, good God!
> And no, people are not going to innovate anything if they are getting taken care of.
HN is full of people who are effectively taken care of yet innovate. For example, many people here have great jobs that provide all they need, yet they are busily spending evenings and weekends working on their own innovate projects.
There are others here who have made enough on start ups to cash out, and never have to work again--and they are busy making new companies.
Very few people innovate because they need to have their material needs taken care of.
Profits are only generated in two situations: one, overregulated or rigged markets where competition can't drive prices down, or two, due to market demands that have not yet done long run corrections to push labor into certain high-demand industries.
The problem here is that there is no high-demand industry in need of labor. What is happening is, for the most part, the first (overregulation creating false markets) and if we are going to have that, you need to correct for the siphoning of money into the tiny class of business elites holding ownership of dividend shares in businesses with these margins.
Your two options are to deregulate a large portion of the economy, or tax the rich and give it to the poor. The former would be nice, but I can't imagine socialist-heavy France taking that approach. The problem is I think it might be too late for the former in the first place - the productivity siphon has been in effect for decades due to international manipulation of national law to favor big business that has concentrated wealth and resources too heavily, so even if you deregulated many industries the investment capital in competing with entrenched players in markets, even those with artificially inflated prices just isn't there. When you concentrate money that much, the few with the means have no reason to part with it and drive new innovation outside of the safe law-created false markets they can throw money in and expect money out (the most extreme example is to be a bank getting free money out of the US fed at 0%)
I think it is a cultural scar that everyone is expected to spend 1/3 their week laboring for someone else (most of the time). If that labor doesn't produce real value (and a lot of the US jobs market is artificial middle men rendered obsolete by pervasive instantaneous international communication of information) you are just wasting peoples time having them drain their energy and time in a fruitless job, where they might (you never know) take their free time and initiative spent on petty labor and produce miraculous things like new inventions or art or community service.