See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome . I don't see what's the theoretical problem of having a "socialist" minimum for everybody together with a "capitalist" system where you can make as much as you can.
Suppose the utility loss from taking a job is X, and U(income) is a concave function. Both of these are standard assumptions, well validated empirically.
With no basic income, people will take a job if U(job income) - X > U(income=0), or equivalently U(job income)-U(income=0) > X.
With a basic income, people take a job if U(job income + basic income) - U(basic income) > X.
By concavity, there are values of X for which the former inequality holds and the latter does not. So people falling into this regime will be deterred from taking a job by a basic income.
Society as a whole is poorer as a result by an amount equal to those individual's marginal productivity. I.e., fewer nails are manicured, fewer homes are cleaned, fewer restaurant meals are supplied.
Note that you can alleviate these negative effects by replacing a basic income guarantee with a basic job guarantee (i.e., just like a basic income, but you need to work for it). That also costs the taxpayer far less.
Society also benefits, since it gains some productive labor from the workers. Rather than paying $7/hour of Basic Income and getting $0 in value in return, society might pay $7/hour of Basic Job and get $4 of litter removed from parks in return.
It doesn't acheive the goal of reducing administrative overhead, since actually creating jobs has considerable administrative overhead.
It also doesn't achieve the goal of increasing labor mobility and facilitating experimental, entrepreneurial endeavours.
In fact, it doesn't do much of what Basic Income does.
The relevant question is costs - benefits.
The cost of Basic Income is $20k x # of adults + overhead. The cost of Basic Jobs is $20k x # of adults willing to work who can't find work + overhead - value of labor provided.
I'll make up some USA-centric numbers to illustrate the calculation.
Suppose overhead for BI is $50/year and overhead for BJ is $5000/year. Suppose further that there are 250M adults, 50M of which are willing to work but can't find work. (The remaining 200M will keep their current job.)
Cost of BI is $5 trillion, cost of BJ is $1.25 trillion. This assumes that the Basic Jobs provide no value whatsoever and Basic Income provides no disincentive to labor whatsoever.
If you disagree, please cook up your own numbers and show me how this could be wrong. I'm just curious to see any mathematical model where BI makes sense - I haven't been able to come up with one myself.
edit: Additionally, I think it would be harder to implement a Basic Job program well. Compared to Basic Income, we'll lose some amount of physical mobility and some amount of value from enterprises that take a long time to bear fruit. The Basic Job program will have to be pretty well managed to provide enough value to compensate.
Since a lot of industrialized countries have had high unemployment for years, if not decades, that seems like an impossible idea. It might even be worse because if you send the unemployed to clean parks and plant trees, you effectively destroy a labor market for gardeners.
I don't know if a "Mincome" would work but if you want to guarantee everyone a job, you need some pretty clever ideas how to create those jobs - preferably without negative side-effects on existing low-wage markets.
What about the New Deal's CCC?
Unless it turns out to be more efficient than the social welfare programs it would replace, it would be a redistribution of additional tax money that would have to be collected. If you define "poorer" as "less output collectively produced" then the parent's point about the concavity of utility would hold and imply that society as a whole would indeed become poorer.
All this is based on a simplified model of things, but that's what most of economics is.
The biggest gains to be had in my opinion would be due to difficult-to-quantify human effects related to people having to spend less time worrying about making ends meet and being able to think and plan more than a few weeks ahead.
If you believe the Keynesians or the Monetarists, it's because they refuse to work at a lower nominal wage than before. Unemployment/welfare/etc makes this an appealing prospect, and Basic Income only makes the problem worse.
* Also, your counter suggestion is based on the assumption that the government can redistribute jobs instead of tax money*
I didn't propose redistributing jobs. I suggest using people on the Basic Job for all low skill government labor, and creating additional (make-work if necessary) jobs if necessary. Make every park sparkling clean, no litter on any road ever, etc.
FDR got creative when he did this and we got a lot of great infrastructure out of it.
How? One of the problems with qualification-based benefit programs is that they reduce the marginal benefit of work (both unemployment and welfare benefits go down with work, which reduces the marginal benefit of any given nominal wage level, which makes people more likely to seek to avoid work at any given nominal wage level -- which also makes the benefit programs more expensive to administer, since they then need mechanism to try to catch people avoiding work to maintain the benefits.)
If you have unconditional basic income, you assure that work always has a higher marginal benefit for the same nominal wage than it would have in a traditional system of means-tested benefits, which reduces the incidence of people rejecting work at any given nominal wage.
However, a Basic Job guarantee can only go one way. You never get to avoid the disutility of labor (X in my formulation).
But I'll dispute one point: you assure that work always has a higher marginal benefit
BI assures that work has a higher marginal income. It does not assure that work has a higher marginal utility, which is what matters.
Sorry, how is that? Under the current scheme, if I increase my wages (from $0 to $10k or from $8k to $14k or whatever), I lose my benefits. Under Basic Income, I do not lose my benefits; I only gain by increasing my wages.
Which is the beauty of a basic income -- it means that employers no longer need to merely outcompete destitution, but instead offer a compelling reason for people to come work for them. Unpleasant but vital jobs would become better compensated, while there would be strong pressure to eliminate useless make-work jobs.
The world economy has not been suffering a labor shortage for a very long time. Basic income allows a lot of menial labor to be automated without destroying lives, and in the long term will redirect that output to creative and skilled labor, thus enriching society on more than one level.
When we have "means tested" programs (i.e., anything for "the poor" or "the unemployed") then the marginal benefit of a job (or doing more work) U(base or base job income + new job income) - U(base or base job income). When you factor in needs-based benefits U() can be a very peculiar function, and the marginal benefit can be small relative to the new job income, or even negative.
If we take the social safety net as a given, then we shouldn't abstract away the existence of that net. A basic income has the potential to remove the need for more sophisticated implementations of the safety net, ones that can lead to poor U() functions.
In fact I think that the bottom of the concave U() function cannot work as in theory, because of what is considered socially acceptable. Your first $1000 in income is very valuable because you are living in terrible deprivation. But some people are not able to make that income, no matter the utility. It may be job availability, it may be a disability, or an injury, or addiction to drugs, a criminal history. It could be a parent that has succumbed to any of these. It's hard to enumerate or easily define what any of these are, so to some degree we are willing to offer help simply because someone is experiencing deprivation.
Which is to say, the part of the U() curve that a basic income chops off is already really messed up.
Now, keeping it small is another matter.
It's possible that under this system the Swiss will gain more employment because their people will be spending more on goods that proportionately employ other Swiss people in the value chain.
It's the reverse argument to the Trickle-down idea, I think.
2: Entitlement. A lot of people will decide that they are entitled to that money, that it is not enough for whatever arbitrary minimum lifestyle they decide they are entitled to, and that the police power of the state should/will/must be used to confiscate the difference from taxpayers.
In fairness, all should contribute to society at least as much value as they derive from society (at least insofar as they are physically & mentally capable). Giving people enough to live on while requiring nothing of them screws up the human psychology of self-worth: they can exert $X of effort/skill and get $X, or do nothing at all and get $X ... meaning their effort/skill is worth nothing.
Well, that's the point, isn't it?
That's only with current welfare systems, not with basic income, where you receive it regardless of your income.
So under the regime being proposed, by not working you'd get $X, and by working $Y you'd get $X+$Y (less taxes).
If you use the franchise fee model to talk about a basic income, that is the point. A crony capitalist business screws up everyone's environment, screws up everyone's health, screws up everyone's economic situation, screws up everyone's government, screws up everyone's wealth and income distribution by population graph and all the social issues that result from it, therefore everyone is equally entitled to a small cut of the action because they're already involuntarily getting a cut of the degradation. Seems fair enough.
There's an American tradition of privatize all the profits and socialize all the losses, this could be interpreted as socialize some of the profits and I'm sure we'll continue to socialize all the losses. Some worry about it, but it wouldn't really change that much.
One common argument against a basic income is assuming it can only be implemented with means testing. I see some of that at the end of your comment. Especially in the underground economy, which is already big and growing.
The small set of people who are only motivated to work by the threat of destitution, and who would be satisfied by a pittance and choose not to pursue further labor, are people whose labor was likely never worth much in the first place.
Their labor may not be worth much. It still needs doing, and you're compelling others to take away any incentive to do it.
Remember: they're hired to do that work because your time as a professional thinker is much more valuable than you spending hours doing mundane tasks. Better you spend an hour writing software for $X and paying someone else to empty the trash & clean toilets & etc. for 0.1x$X, than for you to spend that hour doing those mundane tasks for $0 while being compelled to still pay that someone 0.1x$X.
So yeah, because you're not really going to do all those little things you rely on low-wage laborers to do, you're going to DOUBLE their pay (giving them that "minimum" amount for not doing anything, plus giving them that amount to do that work after all) with no increase in output, and a likely decrease in work done because by definition that minimum guaranteed income is enough to live on.
If it's uneconomical to employ people solely to do those jobs, then the jobs can be automated, or fixtures and processes can be changed to reduce the need for that labor.
If you want to run utility poles in most municipalities, you can, but you'll pay a franchise fee to the city. The theory is you're making a profit by inconveniencing all the residents by occasionally blocking streets and putting up ugly utility poles and the like. So you pay everyone a little bit of your profit because you're ruining everyone's property by a tiny little bit.
Now the environmental (or any regulatory) problem is demonstrated as "hey, I should be able to dump raw nuclear waste in the river, although it is true that it ruins the river for everyone, it is also true that everyone gets an equal fraction of my profits". Same argument for "I should be able to boom/bust the housing economy because everyone gets a cut" or avoid OSHA or whatever.