[marvin]

Very sincere arguments and reasoning. Alternatively, guns. There will be fewer winners than losers.

As I've been pointing out for a long time now, Norway de facto has a system like this with the welfare state already (primarily due to high petroleum incomes). If you are a Norwegian citizen and somehow unable to make a living (low skills, illness), the government will pay you a small but sufficient amount of money. This is what we will eventually need to institute across the whole world - tax the richest and use the proceeds to give a "guaranteed salary" to everyone. For instance, through negative taxation where below a certain income the government pays _you_. This is the only good way to ensure basic human needs for everyone in a world where technological leverage makes everyone but a small amount of very skilled workers redundant.

Eventually, the social stigma of recieving such benefits will vanish, since a significant part of the population will not do enough work to cross the threshold.

[jmmcd]

This is already in place almost across the western world. Norway's welfare state is not all that unusual.

> Eventually, the social stigma of recieving such benefits will vanish, since a significant part of the population will not do enough work to cross the threshold.

That will only work if the government is able to raise sufficient taxes from the shrinking proportion of the population who are paying them. If trends towards income inequality continue, there will be few, wealthy taxpayers. But the larger their share of the burden, the more they'll use tax avoidance schemes, whether legal or illegal. That has already been seen in countries where very high taxe rates have existed.