I tend to agree with that solution, though I think there are more and less sustainable vs. conflict-inducing ways of structuring it. The simplest way is just to pay out cash collected from taxes, but that's always subject to conflict around "my tax money going to support lazy bums" type stuff, and easy to cut (or fiddle with in various ways to meet other budgetary goals).

More sustainable basic incomes tend to be structured as royalties imo, like Alaska's oil fund. One possibility would be to look at what might happen in a future where agriculture is mainly mechanized, so in effect food is being grown by robots. Initially what that'll mean is whoever got in place first will profit from them; whoever had the land and the capital to invest in the robots will then own the results of their production, even in a hypothetical future where they run 100% on autopilot henceforth. So it's a sort of strong-dependence-on-initial-conditions type situation, where who gets the results of the robots' labor depends basically on who was on top in the last pre-robot generation (granted, it may not be a purely black-and-white pre-robot/robot transition). I think in that case we'd have to eventually (somehow) transition towards a bunch of arable land + robots being held in trust for the population as a whole, splitting up the proceeds, or at least a portion of them, like the Alaska oil fund.

Lots of details and questions around exactly how the numbers work out, but at a high level I like a solution of not intruding much into the "normal" part of the economy, like humans doing things for other humans, but operating some basic minerals/land/agriculture in some sort of trust arrangement, with proceeds distributed to everyone, as their share of the proceeds of the earth+robots (as opposed to the proceeds of other humans' labor).

There's a comment further down linking to a series of articles which propose the same solution. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm is the relevant article.

It's something that should be considered since it seems like currently there's nothing really keeping the value of human labor from going down, leaving most people destitute. However, even if it could be financed successfully, it would be a very dramatic change for our economy and society, and I don't really see any way to there from here. Our present culture is ultimately rooted on consumerism -- most people earn as much money as they're able to working a job and then spend all of it on things they need. We permit a small elite who can earn enough money to not need to work for a living to do as they see fit, but the vast majority is kept doing what society requires of them by the need to work at a job and earn a wage.

In a world where people are free to do what they want, there needs to be something to encourage them to do something which is beneficial to society, to prevent stagnation. The whole system begins to sound a lot like a refinement of what communist countries hoped to achieve in the 20th century, and it feels like we're back to many of the basic arguments for and against socialism.

If it isn't already clear from what I wrote, I have no real knowledge of this topic and I'm just rambling. The article I linked is a bit long but it and the FAQ it links to try to address some of these issues.

Sorry, I meant to link to the article, not the comments. Can a moderator edit the link? Thanks in advance!