Let me explain: in a communist country, people had various jobs. Each job had a different salary. But everyone had a job, everybody had income. So, if you asked anyone "Do you earn at least $100?" - all would say "Yes". But some could earn more if they were in better jobs. Obviously that meant you didn't actually have to work to receive salary - that's why productivity sucked. Not so different now, huh?

Yes, still very, very different. Having a job where you don't actually accomplish any work is completely different from not having a job at all. Having a non-productive job wastes your time and saps your energy. I've had them before, and they're soul-crushing. Not having a job at all, on the other hand, frees you to do real work. Creative work, work in line with your passion. That's what we really need people to be spending their time on, not raking all the leaves from one end of Central Park to the other and back.

When J.K. Rowling was on benefits from the UK government, she wrote the first in a series of novels that would go on to become the best-selling novel series of all time and earn her hundreds of millions of pounds, a good portion of which went back to the UK government in tax revenue. If instead she had been forced to do a menial, unproductive job, none of that would have happened. Her words on the subject: “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. … And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Buckminster Fuller hit the nail on the head with this quote: “We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

I understand your point and you are quite right that if an exceptional individual has given space to pursue his passion without the worries of "making a living", it's awesome and they can blossom. But for general population, this doesn't work. Otherwise Poland would be filled with success in all fields instead of 2M jobless receiving unemployment pension.