I think there are a number of shaky assumptions there:
1) lazy people only cost $10k if they're on the dole
2) all lazy people, absent the dole, will become criminals
3) there's a shortage of work to be done, and that the labor market is a zero-sum game
The expense of #1 is typically greater than $10k because of the vast array of bureaucracy to see whether or not they "deserve" the $10k. I would suggest this could be reduced by harassing them less and just giving them money.
#2 is a reasonable assumption since lazy or not, people have to eat. Absent a government subsidy, they'll seek other sources of income. In the modern West, that is mostly burglary, robbery and illicit drugs. If the alternative is starving and/or dying of exposure, they'll become criminals. Unless you suppose that necessity stops people being lazy? Experience does not suggest that this is the case.
The labour market need not be a zero-sum game, and of course we get the multiplier effect and so on. But broadly-speaking, there are far more unemployed than there are job vacancies. There are 729,000 registered unemployed in Australia, and 220,000 job vacancies. Of course, not all vacancies are advertised, but not all people seeking jobs are officially unemployed - some are uni students, some are getting disability pensions or the like, some are working part-time and would like to work more hours, and so on, and this is roughly the same number of people again, depending how you count it, at least half to more than a million. And of course, many vacancies require higher qualifications or experience which are typically found in people already employed full-time, rather than in the long-term unemployed.
But roughly-speaking, there are 4 people for every vacancy. So a job given to A means B, C and D miss out. If one of the four is hardworking, and one is lazy, I would rather the hardworking one got the opportunity. They'll make more of it, and will be better for the rest of the people in the workplace to work with.
I strongly disagree here. I won't presume to speak for everyone else here, but in my opinion, there's a world of difference. The money that a FIREd person has represents an accumulated unpaid debt that society owes that person for the value they have contributed to the economy by their work. They have chosen (or in some cases, been forced) to set aside some of their compensation, so that when the time comes that they either cannot or do not wish to work longer, society owes them enough that they can call in that debt and live comfortably. A dole bludger, roundly speaking, has not contributed to society and therefore is owed nothing, from a purely economic perspective.
Of course you disagree. The mentality of we wealthy is by necessity, "We deserve our wealth, and the poor deserve their poverty."
The increased wealth you and I have are not solely from our own work. Someone else built the roads, the railways, the power lines, someone helped take our mothers safely through childbirth, and so on. Other people's work has enabled and multiplied our wealth. Some of us may pay this back in the form of taxes, but most of us try to minimise this. Our wealth is built on the backs of poorer people.
"More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author ofMarxism for Infants— all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel." - Down The Mine, George OrwellNowadays the "poor drudges" are mostly not in the West, but in China and India, in the deserts of the oilfields of the Middle East. Our wealth is not solely due to ourselves, but borrowed from their labour. We don't like to think about this too much, it's bad for our "pulled myself up by my own bootstraps!" narrative. But there it is.
Society is not indebted to us. We are indebted to society.
We apply double standards. This is why Australia's Foreign Minister can claim her boyfriend as her spouse while claiming $32k in benefits for him, but is not obliged to call him her spouse when declaring his financial interests. [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/04/welfare-crackdown-on-relationships-a-double-standard-not-applied-to-mps] Still less is her income means-tested based on his, the way it would be if she were drawing a sole parent's benefit. We have high standards and careful scrutiny of the people receiving $10,000 of public money, but are lax and indifferent to those getting $500,000 of public money.
None of us "deserve" our wealth, still less do we "deserve" to be idle. We are idle or not, according to our nature. And this is why I say: just give them the money and leave them alone. Just not, that ye be judged, some dude said.
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