Minimum guaranteed income can not get here soon enough.
Charles Eisenstein makes the case for it in chapter 14 of Sacred Economics: http://sacred-economics.com/sacred-economics-chapter-14-the-...
When the state stepped in and seized control of our homelands, and then said: "This person, with this piece of paper, now owns these resources", essentially creating out of thin air the concept of "wealth", they took upon themselves a moral responsibility to see to it that wealth was distributed in a way that everyone gets at least a living share.
The current system, where you are either born into a dynasty with resources, or you are for all intents and purposes enslaved to people who are (albeit with some small chance of moving between groups) fails at that promise, even though the poor largely fulfill their end of the bargain by making themselves available for labor. Many go without their basic needs taken care of. A basic income would fix that. The situation is absurd, and it's an utter waste of human capital to throw talented "low" class kids into the thresher.
Welfare via the state is probably as old as Rome, and probably much older than that.
Agriculture was generally borne of desperation and scarcity, and cultures that adopted agriculture also adopted government and notions of land ownership. It was still a pretty raw deal compared to being a hunter-gatherer though, especially since hunter-gatherers were still better at warfare than farmers so from time to time a group of hunter-gatherers might show up and take whatever they wanted from you.
But even among hunter-gatherers, there were no human rights. You had to work, you received your share, but only if the hunter-gatherers from around the way didn't run short on resources and showed up one day and killed all your men and captured all your women.
When you implicitly demand that people work for money, you're making an intuitive error that brilliant economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, have mistakenly stepped into many times: the idea that value comes from a day's work. That's the folk version of it, but in economic's early days it was professionally argued for enough to get its own name: the labor theory of value. There's a long history of debate around it, and even today there are highly sophisticated versions of it floating around that have added epicycles and epicycles of subtlety, but the long and short of it is that it's been proven wrong. Not from a normative point of view (which is impossible anyways, as that's just moralizing), but empirically speaking.
And the moral version of it doesn't make much sense either. I'd be the last to say that an investment banker doesn't work hard, but does he work harder than a single mother on food stamps holding down three part time jobs? Or, for that matter, do either of them work harder than a peasant in rural India?
Lots of things determine income. But by far the biggest is economic productivity, which is heavily correlated to capital intensity.
As a collective whole, we are far more productive now than we were a couple decades ago, let alone a couple centuries. For that we get far higher incomes for far less work. Does being born in a first world country in the 21st century deserve extra income? No, not really. Yet we live with it and don't beat ourselves over the head for it: we do it because we can. And even once developing countries have caught up with us, we'll still have to ask ourselves if we deserve greater income than our ancestors merely for coming after them.
Capital will continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future. It will not be long before the labor of maybe a billion people worldwide are able to provide a standard of living for everyone that's higher than people in first world countries get today.
Do the people who aren't part of that productive core "deserve" the money? I mean, maybe, maybe not, but does the answer to that question even matter? None of us really deserve what we have, so so long as we make a workable system where the incentives line up so that everyone can live rich lives with a base level of income, I'm all for it.
Where did Adam Smith say this? From what I understand of Smith's position, it was that value comes from either use or trade: you produce something and either use it yourself, or trade it for something else. How long it took you to produce it is irrelevant to what you can use it or trade it for.
The full answer is a bit more complex than that: it's also true that Smith says contradictory things. I'm not enough of a Smith scholar to give a definitive answer, but it seems that Smith mostly purposed it for rhetorical effect, since it is so compelling on a folk level. Other classical economists like Ricardo bought into it much more heavily as an analytic tool.
The statement that "They contain the value of a certain quantity of labour which we exchange for what is supposed at the time to contain the value of an equal quantity" is the closest Smith comes to saying something like the labor theory of value, but note that he says "supposed"--in other words, our intuitive sense is that, on average, equal amounts of labor should produce equal amounts of value. So he's still not saying the same thing as the labor theory of value says; he's talking about an effect of the free market, not how prices should be set in such a market. (And, as you note, the full answer is more complex: for one thing, we have to account for differences in productivity.)
If you have any quotes from other classical economists like Ricardo, I'd be interested to see them; my sense is that the labor theory of value is mainly due to later schools of economics, not classical economics.