[bausson]

The objective of basic income is not to increase everyone's wealth, but to increase overall quality of life.

Restaurants wouldn't disappear, but it would be a bit more expensive. Also, I suppose restaurants which treat their personal badly would quickly disappear. (You can say that's wishful thinking, but the lever effect would be quite effective against those).

If you really love your job, and that's everything for you, ok, not much of a change, you may even get a bit less money. Chance is that you work with people who enjoy it too, and basic income wouldn't be much of a change for you.

But if you have a side project you want to launch, it could be what makes the difference, even if it wouldn't be possible in the current economy. Or you could take a few years off to raise your children (or help them go through a difficult period, I heard it can happen).

"Established" company have a lot to loose in that proposal, mainly those we depend on cheap labor. But it would also create a lot of opportunities on the market, so the economical aspect wouldn't be that bad.

What kind of opportunities? Let's say, if people have a bit more free time, child education through fab-lab would be pretty neat (complement or replacement of school, IDK). This is just one "on the spot" idea, it could be done today... if people took the time, or could take it.

[jerf]

I'm not saying the point is to make people more wealthy... I'm saying, the society must be wealthy enough to afford it. The food comes from somewhere. The clean water comes from somewhere. Wealth must exist to be redistributed.

Frankly, "look at all the wonderful things that people will do when they're freed from having to do the things they are doing today" is the scariest thing about it. I'm a programmer. A pretty decent one. The exact sort of surplus-generator that this scheme is predicated on. I go to work and I enjoy my job, but let's be honest, if I could choose how I spent my time, it is not what I would do. I would do something fun and personally interesting, like my outliner (read: "yet another f'ing text editor"), or one of my video game ideas.

This is MURDER to the basic income idea. It only works if enough of us choose to keep working away on things we don't really want to do, and there's a real tension between "a living wage"... that is, by definition enough to "live" on without a job... and something less than that, which is hardly basic income.

How many people are advocating for a basic income because they really think it's just, and how many people are just itching to use it as a way of not having to work anymore (but use the high-minded wealth redistribution as a cover for advocacy)? Even on HN, I rather suspect there's more of the former than we'd like, more people dreaming about how they could easily live frugally if they could not work at all... and we're the workaholics of the world if ever there were any, we crazy programmers. If this is put to a vote, how many millions of people would be just voting to never have to work again? We're not that rich that we can take that yet.

The exact reason why we can't all just do what we want, today, is that "what we want" doesn't add enough value to society on its own for us to be able to afford it. If we could live in a glorious wonderland where we just did what we wanted and we all came out collectively wealthy in the end, we wouldn't have to try to create some "basic income" idea, we could just do it right now... but we can't. Our desires don't overlap the needs of the world well enough. That's true even here in the programming world, and if anything in the entire spectrum of work would work like that, it's our world, with open source and feasible free collaboration between thousands on single products. I can't see how to make the numbers add up... and that is what we have to do if we're going to make this work, not rhapsodize about how wonderful it all could be in Utopia if only we got together and wished hard enough.