Even in such a situation, what incentive besides purely humanitarian does an individual with a job have to sacrifice income for those who do not?
Currently you can justify subsidising a non productive person in the hopes that they will be productive later. What happens if that is highly unlikely and instead they devote their time to breeding more people who will also likely become unproductive and require subsidy?
For example if you gave software developers a bunch of cash and told them to work on whatever they wanted, how many would go and build video games or invent esoteric programming languages (fun but not important) vs how many would want to build (or worse maintain) a system for the administration of taxes (less fun but very important). Hell, how many would even develop software at all vs just take up some other activity of even less value.
Therefor the best way to motivate these people is to extrinsic motivate them with money. However what happens if most of that money is taken as taxation and spent on people who sit around and do whatever they want all day? Do they still have the same incentive to do the boring but necessary jobs?
There will be luxuries some people want that are beyond the reach of those who live just on the guaranteed basic income. Those people will do the jobs that have not yet been replaced by technology to earn the extra money they need.
For instance, some people might want more living space. Some might want fancier cars than those people on the GBI can afford. Some might fancy a boat. Some might want a high end home entertainment system. Some might like expensive food and drink.
Open source software is an interesting example, but I think it mostly supports my case.
If you look at the projects out there, you can divide them into roughly 3 camps.
1) Projects that have a lot of paid developers working for companies or organisations that pay wages to their developers. So stuff like Android , V8 and Ubuntu would fall into this camp.
2) Projects that people were not necessarily paid to develop , but were developed mostly as a biproduct of something that they were or as a way to do that thing more effectively. "Scratch an itch" software effectively. I guess something like RoR would fall into this category.
3) Pure passion projects that were developed for fun. This is the only group that is purely intrinsically motivated.
The thing with projects that fall into camp #3 is that they tend to be stuff that the developer themselves found useful or interesting rather than something that necessarily serves society at large, though the two may sometimes intersect there is no guarantee.
If you don't make peoples incomes at least somewhat dependant upon the software they develop you will see far more camp #3 projects than camps #1 or #2.
" time to pay everyone to stay at home"
There are various levels of "paying everyone to stay at home" There is moving to a part-time employment model. There are also possibilities for interesting good things to happen to the labor market once everyone is not trapped in "must always work" mode.
I know I would certainly not willingly give up half my hours and income and have to put all of my work in a state where someone else can take over every few days.
I think the taxman's bludgeon would be the weapon of choice here.
>I know I would certainly not willingly give up half my hours and income and have to put all of my work in a state where someone else can take over every few days.
What do you propose as an alternative? A worker-class and a loafer-class? Prisons? Eugenics? Population control isn't very warm and fuzzy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5iFESMAU58&list=PL381A1925D...
Then you have to define what counts as "work", does reading HN count towards your daily allowance since it is tangentially related to your work? What about reading documentation? Or is it only the hours you are typing code into an editor?
All options seem undesirable when you take them to their logical conclusions.
Not me man, I have a job. I just said taxes because that seems like the favorite/most humane weapon of gov't with which to influence people.
>All options seem undesirable when you take them to their logical conclusions.
Such is the case for doing nothing as well, I believe.