Can you explain why those are contradictory?

Surely some people will opt to not have a job at all, if they didn't need to worry about maintaining a minimum quality of life and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

there are more than enough things to do that help society, which aren't done at the moment, because no one pays for them.

I often see a lady riding her RoundABout scooter, on disability, picking up trash on the side of the road. She's incredibly nice and good hearted, and hates sitting around doing nothing. But the reason I stopped to talk to her was that it is unbelievably unusual for someone who is obviously on disability to be out doing something for the common good.

And unless you have some hard data showing people on public assistance use their free time doing the unsung dirty work society needs, I don't believe it will magically start happening if we change the name of welfare to UBI.

Not sure how that's relevant. It's pretty clear the proposal is "require people to do the handiwork of their community in order to receive a basic income."

Why not? That's what I would have done in my early twenties.

People who don't give a fuck already doing it.

Also, just because no one is willing to pay for what you do doesn't mean you are doing nothing. I think there will be a bunch of people doing different things than now and many anti-UBI people would call what they gonna do 'sitting around'.

And it seems most people do it when they're in their 60s and older... and they'd start sooner if they had the finances to.

Maybe it's just me but I'm getting tired of UBI being put forward as a realistic answer to technological displacement of workers. The most immediate problem would be getting it through legislatures without loopholes that undercut its purpose as a replacement for all other redistributions. That simply never happens, particularly in the US.

The next problem is that no one seems to appreciate how incompatible it is with open borders in a world of nation-states. The latter is particularly telling since advocates of UBI are often advocates of less restrictive immigration across the world, yet they don't seem to see the problem. It's an indication of how ungrounded the discussion about UBI is right now.

I have the feeling, alle the counter arguments simply boil down to "all humans are lazy and won't work anymore if we don't force them" which is a pretty dull view on humanity.

> a pretty dull view on [sic] humanity

Matter can't travel faster than c. Thermodynamics is a bitch.

These theories are as intractable as they are annoying. They are not proven beyond doubt. But before launching a venture in contradiction to them, evidence must be mounted. "It feels right" isn't a scientific basis for policy.