It's nice to know that our economy is based on making the life of a percentage of the population a living hell.
"Living hell" is putting it a bit strongly, especially considering that non-productive sectors also include positions that those holding them don't look on as heaven exactly; but I agree with your criticism, that our economy is, indeed, based on exploitation; and I also agree with what I think is your implication, that at least some part of the in-principle criticism that UBI so often draws owes from people having so internalized this principle that this work "ethic" sometimes comes to be looked on as some virtue, or if not that, then at least as necessary to the functioning of the economy. I believe that latter kind of criticism is based on a flawed assumption, or at least, on an unevidenced assumption.
eta:
I work in middle management in a metal industry, and I have my doubts of how universal income can work in a globalised economy. Does any of you work in the productive sector? Industry, food production, etc., you know, actually "making stuff"? In my (admittedly simplistic) view of economy, I can´t stop thinking that "making stuff" is the base of the economy, and the rest follow. If a UI makes us have to pay bigger salaries to our blue collar workers...
(who have to sit for 8 hours in front of a dirty machine pumping out metal parts, with noise, dirt and boredom guaranteed for the rest of their working life, I mean, they would ask for a raise or just go home and live off the UI, unless you make the UI so low that they can´t afford enough good things for their kids... )
...then our industries would not be competitive, compared to other countries without UI.. and the whole thing would tumble down. Unless your economy can sustain itself from petrol, tourism or something else, but even then, strategically letting the industrial and productive tissue die off is quite blindsighted in the long run, IMO. (just more of what is happening to industry in Europe and the USA in the last few years with globalisation).
Actually I agree, in the short run at least, a good many positions are at risk of going unfilled, not just in what you refer to as the productive sectors, but in other -- non-productive? -- sectors as well.
In the long run, though, a UBI would -- should, at any rate -- result in elimination, or at least minimization, of jobs that no one would want to do unless on pain of poverty and starvation. That would seem to be the civilized ideal, as opposed an economy that is based, in practice if not necessarily in principle, on exploitation.
I suggest that even this short run difficulty can be dealt with by allowing a lag of a few years between announcement and actual implementation of a UBI program. (On the other hand, if the necessary consensus for a UBI is already availaible, then to defer it by a few years in order to accomadate industry, thereby resulting in withholding that UBI from those that have need of it, if only for a few years more, would appear unconscionable , and deserving of the same kind of criticism that Olmstead makes of your position.)
Another possible work-around might be a temporary assistance, financial I suppose, else via indirect tax breaks or something, to industry? That again might be difficult, given that the UBI needs to be funded from taxes.
So that the difficulty you bring up does not seem to have some obvious solution, at least in the short term, true. Some tariff-based protection to domestic industry, maybe, to assist them over the transition? That kind of thing comes with its own set of problems, though.
