An interesting repercussion of such a system is the potential for unrestrained creative endeavour. Fear of meeting basic needs will no longer be the primary motivator for most workers. Free to think of and most importantly act on new ideas, our massive population will be able to attempt to function like a distributed network. There will be those who choose to only consume, but that is no different today, many people are simply required to perform a meaningless job in order to do so. I would imagine that the benefit of freeing millions of willing inventors outweighs the drain imposed by all those who only consume. Then again, this only makes sense assuming that most repetitive and "busy" work can be automated.