1. A guaranteed basic income to every citizen, which would be enough for a person to live on without a job, would cost more than the entire annual income of the Federal government. Even if it didn't, people would simply vote to increase their incomes until it did.
2. It would be regressive: under most of the basic income plans that have been proposed, people who are currently on welfare would get less money from the government than they do now. On the other hand, middle class people who don't need extra money will get it. Basic income would represent a transfer of income from the poorest to everyone else.
3. It would not replace existing welfare systems. People like to think that it would, but political realities would prevent that from happening. When has the Congress ever passed a simple, elegant piece of legislation that undid layers of bureaucracy, and then prevented it from being changed? It's simply unrealistic to assume that could happen in our political system.
4. Political, ideological, and moral forces in our culture and society have caused us to have our current welfare systems, and those same forces would cause us to revert to those systems even if basic income were implemented. Some examples of these forces are the social constructions of race and class, views about who deserves money and who does not, and the moral value of work. Basic income is a blank-slate social engineering fantasy that ignores all of these things.
5. Basic income is likely to be a race to the bottom. You cannot redistribute wealth that does not exist. By decreasing incentives for work, basic income will reduce the amount of wealth created, which will reduce the amount of money that can be distributed to people as their basic income.
6. If steps are taken to incentivize work to avoid the problem in #5, e.g. increasing the basic income payments to people who have jobs to incentivize other people to get jobs, basic income won't be "basic" anymore. Such incentives would open the door to many other proposals that would result in some people getting more basic income money than others. Many of these proposals will be popular, such as extra money for single mothers, less money for convicted felons and drug users, etc. The forces I mentioned in point 4 would thereby reconstruct our current welfare systems within the framework of the basic income policy.
It basically goes like this:
1) Governments have claimed a monopoly on the land and resources. Basically through military conquest at some point in the past.
2) Before there was any government people were able to use the land freely. So basically they were robbed of something that they could previously use.
3) Fairness dictates that compensation for such a loss must be made.
4) Charge people for the use of land, resources, airwaves, etc.
5) This income goes to all people in the country equally.
This type of basic income does not violate any economic reality that I am aware of.
Now, it will not be enough to so that people can choose to live without working. Such thinking is anti-reality. Absent work, decay (entropy) is the law of the universe. This can not be changed. But it will be fair compensation for no longer having access to the land resources that hunter / gatherers had.
It's clearly an experiment to get real data about basic income, which has not been done before. Even if basic income is not viable, having data will be useful.
1) I did not qualify the viability of basic income in my statement. I just gave my opinion on what the author might say on this issue given that he is highly critical of the financial viability of the US social system. (he wants to reduce spending)
2) YCombinator doing a test doesn't mean that it is a viable model.