[ebiester]

1. A basic income doesn't mean that you have enough to fulfil all dreams. There will still be reasons to earn more income, especially with those who are capable of delivering value.

2. There is a fundamental assumption that we are at a technological stage where work can be automated. If there are not enough jobs that someone a standard deviation below average intelligence can fulfil, we could be coming upon a societal disaster.

If instead, we incentivize automation by saying, "no job is a superior alternative to an easily automatable, low value job where people are treated as disposable," there is no significant conflict. If people with low skill do not choose to work, and their skills are automatable, it is only our moral qualms that get in the way.

As it is now, significant portions of the population cannot provide enough value to ensure their subsistence, minimum wage or otherwise. Is it only our morals that require some work from them?

3. Incentivizing not working also means incentivizing spending a year on an idea that could advance society, or works of art and literature. Harry Potter was written by someone who decided not to work. There might be major value to society that we're losing because we don't have a basic income.

[unclebucknasty]

What's interesting about your point 3. is that it speaks to these archetypes we have defined for people.

We have so ingrained in our minds that a person's value to society is defined by his/her economic contribution in the traditional sense (i.e. via a job or business ownership), that we assume that a person who does not work has no value by definition. In fact, they are even morally deficient. So, how can they possibly be of a quality/character as to contribute anything to society via arts, ideas, or otherwise?

It's a sneaky bit of circular logic that, for many, argues against a BI.

[ebiester]

There's even more to it -- it's that the only thing of value to society is that which can be traded for money.

[unclebucknasty]

Indeed. When companies that otherwise have the wherewithal choose not to pursue cures or vaccines because there isn't enough profit in it, larger society barely pauses to register the true awfulness of such a calculus.

But, this is the type of stucture that we've engineered to allocate the world's resources--one where human value is malleable and always somewhere along the economic continuum. It's the same structure that precipitates the need for a BI and, sadly, also produces the minds that resist it.