| I can make it more clear. Communism: From each according to his ability; to each according to his need. Basic Income: From each according to his willingness to work; to each according to his need, plus a share of society's surplus production proportionate to the market value of his contributions. In the event where people are as a whole unwilling to contribute an amount greater than necessary to meet everyone's basic needs, Basic Income is very similar to Communism. There is no additional incentive to work harder, because any excess you produce is immediately applied to the shortfall. If you really bust your ass instead of skating by, everyone gets an extra roll of toilet paper this year. If people are generally willing to contribute more than is strictly necessary to keep everyone else alive and healthy, they are very different. Once everyone reaches that critical tipping point, additional voluntary effort is rewarded by the ability to get things you want in addition to the things you need. And that is probably incentive enough to keep the economy from tipping back into "looks like Communism" mode. If you bust your ass instead of skating by, you, personally, can get your very own expensive thingamabob. And that allows someone else to work a job making those expensive thingamabobs, which in turn allows them to get an uncheap doohickey. As such, it seems rather important to always calculate the "needs" in such a way that people are always incentivized to work, or to work harder than they otherwise would. |