This type of statement betrays a total lack of understanding of what a basic income guarantee even is. Plenty of deeply anti-communist thinkers--including probably the most effective one in history--have supported a basic income.
Why did your native Poland fall far short of its productive potential? As you yourself say, it wasn't for lack of money: it was because the things people wanted to consume were not being produced.
The root cause of that was broken capital markets: special interests (or foreign special interests, in the case of Poland) captured political control of the economic resources of Poland and used non-market decision making to allocate capital. If people who completely deprioritize popular standard of living control capital, then, yes, unsurprisingly other things--military, party functionaries, foreign invaders--will end up getting their demand met.
Also: "Because life ain't fair, it never will be unless we live in utopia where everyone is good and there is no evil. So why not try it? Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. And you know what happened next? The Red Revolution."
It's abundantly clear that, for all his faults, you don't even have a passing acquaintance with Marx. He's wrong on virtually everything, but you're not even wrong.
To some extent this already has been tried in the US in the form of cheap mortgage credit to the poor. Thousands of dollars were given to people who defaulted and never paid back. Look where it got us…
Overall, your main flaw is that you're considering the economy an entirely static thing. But as the demand for basic goods increases, it creates new business opportunities for both incumbents and potential entrants into the market. Capital seeks out profits, and relatively more capital would flow into the provision of basic goods. That's what prevents the basic income from dissipating into worthlessness.
No-one is saying that you should. A theoretical BIG would be funded by the money that is currently spent on inefficient and mismanaged state welfare. It's money that is already being spent, used in a different way.
Blatantly untrue -- under basic income poor people will see their relative purchasing power increase, and rich people will see theirs decrease.
3) you will end up with inflation, because free money will create more demand, which in turn will result in smaller supply (relatively to demand) and higher prices
Or maybe supply will go up? You know we have an unemployment problem, right? More demand is exactly what America wants right now. It creates business and employment opportunities.
in the end these $1,000 after a couple of months will buy you only $500 worth of goods (end game is that these $1,000 will be worthless after some period)
Obviously basic income would be pegged to GDP, hence pegged to inflation. This is a non-argument.
And about pegging, if you say you increase the payout according to increasing inflation, then wow, you now have a hyperinflation (that's when prices go up 100% in a matter of days, each week).
Also, your economics is pants. Giving $1000 to everyone is going to make a lot more difference to someone eating out of dumpsters than it is to Bill Gates. And it isn't about rescuing people by giving them a lump sum and expecting that things will be fine, it is just about giving people enough time for reflection that more of them have a chance to sort their shit out. Life is hard and people are disorganised bastards, if we try and make it a bit easier for people we might get more done.
USA Inc. with every citizen as shareholder would work like this: I earn $100K/y, my neighbour just $0/y. I pay $20K in taxes, he pays none. We both get $12K/y from BIG. For me it's a dividend. For my neighbour it's free money. So what's my incentive to work? Screw this, I quit. Now, USA Inc. get's $0/y from both of us. For 4 months we still get the cash, from the surplus. But that runs out, and now we both get $0 and are jobless.
BIG will only work if there are more people who work than those who don't work. Making things easier for people never actually helped them. Those who succeeded had to go through hard work.
Your incentive to work is that you earn $100k instead of $12k. I certainly wouldn't quit my job if it means that much of an income hit. This is actually a real situation for me - I could quit my job tomorrow and get more than $12k in benefits, but I won't.
(I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the premise, just brainstorming)
You'd lose a lot of people as a lifeguard.
That is not a basic income guarantee. With a basic income guarantee, you receive the basic income regardless of whether you have a job or not. You do not have to have a job. If you choose to have a job, you earn a wage in addition to your basic income. The system you're describing is a completely, fundamentally different thing from a basic income guarantee.
When J.K. Rowling was on benefits from the UK government, she wrote the first in a series of novels that would go on to become the best-selling novel series of all time and earn her hundreds of millions of pounds, a good portion of which went back to the UK government in tax revenue. If instead she had been forced to do a menial, unproductive job, none of that would have happened. Her words on the subject: “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. … And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Buckminster Fuller hit the nail on the head with this quote: “We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
But is it really the same thing?
A basic income guarantee is the same as having a basic (food/healthcare/public services/whatever) guarantee (basically, state welfare already implemented in many countries) - the difference is the government is paying in money instead of trying to provide the services themselves.
The way I see it, it's quite different than everybody getting the same income. It has the potential to improve public service efficiency and foster the economy away from big production centers (decreasing city population density, which causes a lot of problems on it's own, like homelessness or poor housing conditions, traffic, health and environmental issues, all of which are problems the government has to waste money on already).
Marks, really? If you want to pose as a scholar, at least learn to spell the names of important historical figures. And this isn't a trivial correction -- because you think his name is Karl Marks, your post will not show up in Web searches of the topic you think you're writing about.
You know what would happen in the US, where there is supply? It would drive spending nuts, demand would grow, prices would grow, therefore inflation would grow and the dollar would lose its value, effectively diminishing the basic income benefits.
Because life ain't fair, it never will be unless we live in utopia where everyone is good and there is no evil. So why not try it? Because there was a guy who wrote it all down. His name was Marks. And you know who used his theories in practice? Lenin. And you know what happened next? The Red Revolution.
Seriously, such ideas for the US… "Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."