You're assuming that the pool of unemployed workers would have the same skills and abilities as the early retirees, many of whom would be in the most productive phases of their careers. There may not be anyone who can fill the job and justify the same pay. If unemployment rates decrease the availability of skills drops off.
I'm not suggesting that unemployed people do the jobs of the people who leave the workforce - just that someone does it, and someone moves job to do their job, and so on, until eventually an unemployed person gets a job. There might be people who are really hard to replace, but they're so unusual that they're not really worth considering when you're talking about national policy.
No one could reasonably suggest that a nation should base their welfare policy ideas on whether or not a few thousand people will be hard to replace if they retire.
No one could reasonably suggest that only a few thousand people would opt to retire early if every adult had an automatic right to a sum in the region of the present basic state pension.[1]
There's nothing particularly unusual about the OP's circumstances, and they made a good point in that a BI would be particularly attractive to asset-rich people who had paid off their mortgages even whilst poor BI recipients struggled to pay rent without their housing benefit
[1]a touch under £6k per year in the UK, which is certainly in the ballpark of BI proposals, as well as probably not enough to replace other subsidies in may parts of the country.
No one could reasonably suggest that only a few thousand people would opt to retire early if every adult had an automatic right to a sum in the region of the present basic state pension.
Suggesting that people will decide not to work if you give them £6k a year is a ridiculous strawman.
The basic income (and the pension for that matter) aren't high enough to buy any significant assets. There's an assumption with a pension that you've already bought a home, you're not going to invest in a new car, that you're unlikely to want the latest expensive gadgets (I'm not arguing that the assumption is right, just that it's there). With a basic income being the equivalent the only people who'd use it to 'opt out' of the workforce are those who already have the assets they want and have decided they won't ever want new or better ones (a vanishingly small number who could probably opt out of the workforce now if they wanted to) and people who have decided they don't want those assets in the first place (a much larger number, but still very small in the grand scheme of things).
Every single person who has £6k x years-they're-likely-to-live could opt out of the workforce right now by your reckoning. It just doesn't happen. There's no reason to believe it would suddenly become popular if a basic income were enacted.
> Suggesting that people will decide not to work if you give them £6k a year is a ridiculous straw man.
Around 1.2 million people over the pensionable age live on only the state pension (and that has other qualification requirements). That's a little more than the number of people over 60 actually in work.
Sure, 40 year olds typically have a little more energy than 70 year olds and quite probably a few years of mortgage payments left, but I still think you can safely add more than a few thousand early [semi]retirees if you open it up to everyone and remove all qualification requirements.
