A random political thought: The idea that everybody needs to work for a living by default; to contribute something to the economy and so on and if they can't they deserve a worse standard of life if anything at all: That's not just ableist and so on, it's also just obviously incorrect. Because the world is full of people who do work for a living but (through no fault of their own!) contribute nothing to the economy.
For example, Meta (formerly Facebook) spent billions of dollars on Horizon Worlds, an MMO-like hangout spot with optional VR that nobody liked or used. Some of that was servers and such, but a lot was just salaries for people. People who sat there, did stuff, probably really stressful things, and got paid for it, but whose net outcome for the wider economy was basically zero because nobody used their product and now the VR version has been cancelled.
If Meta had just paid these people the same to stay at home and do nothing but indulge in their hobbies, the economic result would have largely been the same, the effect on Meta's bottom line would have been the same, and it's likely the people involved would have been much happier, a first in Meta's history.
The money to pay these people a decent living is there, even if they contribute nothing back to an employer. That the money is with Meta as opposed to a social security system at least nominally controlled by the people is a big fucking problem, but at least we know for a fact that the money exists.
Same thing goes for people who worked on video games that got cancelled 90% before completion (which apparently happens a lot), movies that never get released and written off on taxes and so on. People who manufacture things that never get used, people who work on projects that get cancelled because the market shifts and so on.
(Clearly not all of them, sometimes companies do go under, sometimes companies have to close divisions. I'm just talking about the cases where e.g. Meta can clearly choose to pay as many people as they like for as long as they like to deliver a product nobody will ever pay for.)
This has nothing to do with how competent and loyal or lazy these people are; they just randomly ended up in a situation where the very real actual work and effort they did ended up not helping anyone economically. And we just accept that that's life.
So the idea that e.g. disabled people all have to work as much as possible, even if it's unhealthy, that's ideology. We have the money to pay everyone a living wage whether they contribute to the economy or not, and we just chose not to.
To be clear I don't think we should stop paying people who work on products that don't ship or don't sell (we should probably stop paying Mark Zuckerberg and his like). This post is just a question of: Does the money exist in our economy? Yeah, it absolutely does, and this is just one bit of proof.
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