The incentive to take whatever job you can is that even if a job pays very little, that's on top of the basic income.
> With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table
No, the whole point of basic income (vs. traditional means-tested welfare) is that you don't have to do that, and that its counterproductive to do it anyway. All you have to check is "are you a citizen [1]". If you are, you get the benefit.
Working under the table is a tax problem, but its a problem that you already have to address for the tax system, not separately for the benefit system since its not relevant to benefit calculations in a BI system.
> When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work.
With BI at the level that can be maintained without utopian level productivity of that type, people will both need to work and be incentivized to do so; there's no need for an explicit stick, relative deprivation is itself a motivator (sure, not everyone will work, and progressively fewer will work as productivity increases through technology and sustainable BI levels increase. But not everyone needs to work, and BI lets market forces drive that.)
[1] or "citizen or legal immigrant" or whatever the status-based qualification is. Income, etc., isn't part of it.
The goal isn't to provide largess (is it?) its to provide the basics with no strings attached free of charge, anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans.
> "citizen or legal immigrant"
I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals. This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right? Why should specific people starve?
The goal, in my view, of Basic Income is to mitigate the fundamental structural inequity of capitalist markets (particularly in the way that money/commodity exchanges work as a proxy for value/utility), to wit, that such markets weight present utility experienced by market participants by past wealth accumulation, and thus are progressively distortive in terms of distribution of utility.
Providing a basic, no-strings-attached allowance is a means, not an ends.
> anything beyond that should require satisfying the desires of other humans.
As it does in BI -- you have to gain income from market exchange to realize utility beyond that attainable with the BI alone. The difference between BI and your "basic welfare" where the government provides a standard-issue basket of goods and services is that BI is simply additive with other income, whereas the limited exchangeability and substitutability of the standard basket of basic welfare goods and services means that it takes a large additional income to get a small additional benefit, which reduces the incentive to provide additional value since, over some range at the bottom.
> I understand the reason this check is necessary, I also think you're going to end up with a lot of dead illegals.
BI serving its purpose does not preclude other programs serving people present in the jurisdiction of the nation that aren't subject to it. Nor does the example of potential classifications mean that BI couldn't have a different eligibility rule ("everyone physically present in the national jurisdiction" is also a possible rule.)
> This is a moral problem we're trying to solve right?
There are many moral problems. Not all of them have the same solution.
> Why should specific people starve?
I don't recall arguing that anyone should starve.
Are you against the accumulation of capital or do you feel it should have an upper limit? IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society and money saved is debt that hasn't been called in, whether inherited or earned. If society has seen vast productivity gains in the interim then of course money earned by mowing someones lawn a 100 years ago would go a lot further today.
I don't see the accumulation or ownership of capital as fundamental structural inequity
Neither.
> IMO money is a way to measure value provided to society
Obviously, its a way to measure that. I specifically identified how its a problematic way to measure that -- providing equal utility to someone with greater wealth provides greater reward, which means that those who have accumulated wealth -- often aided by inheritance and circumstance of birth -- are most able to redirect society to serve their utility, including reshaping it to direct future wealth to themselves and their descendants. Left unchecked, this tends to make money, overtime, a worse and worse representation of social value provided by the person holding it, and the market value of exchanges a worse and worse measure of the social value of the exchange.
That's not to say that wealth accumulation should not be permitted nor that it should have a fixed upper limit, because those have their own problems.
But it does need to be recognized as a distortion and balanced. and that's increasingly more true the more the rewards of the economy, before considering regulatory interventions, go to capital rather than labor.
However that is not desirable in this case since it makes it too easy to live on government money with little incentives to take whatever job you can. If you lived in a government room, got your government clothing and ate in your government chow hall/mess tent/whatever then you could get a benefit out of shoveling dogshit for 10usd/hour since you could get a better shirt, a more tasty meal, etc. You can't sell access to a government bed because every person would be entitled to one, you can't sell access to government food if any person could show up and you could sell your government shit, but to whom? That person would also be able to get 5 shirts.
With government money you would have to check that that person wasn't working under the table, you would have to provide incentives to work (since it is better for society), etc.
When we truely have human level AI we can make the Culture and nobody has to work. And it will be an epic achievement, but in the transition period we still have to use the carrot and stick.