I used to be much more positive on basic income. A big point here is that basic income could help develop the entire nation. In other words you don't need to li

I used to be much more positive on basic income. A big point here is that basic income could help develop the entire nation. In other words you don't need to live in downtown mega-city to make a living with a basic income. You could live in Bodunk, Utah where $300 gets you a great place. In the big picture you could even have a number of people band together and actually create new towns from the ground up. Imagine you just get 10,000 people working together to build up a new city. If we assume $1000/month income, that's a baseline of $10million a month for development. For low level development that is an enormous amount of money. People could literally build their own new cities from the ground up. And you could certainly entice plenty of engineers, construction workers, and the sort with such plans. Building your own future is enticing for anybody! But I've become jaded here. There was a recent article about somebody on social security living in their SUV because they couldn't afford the rent in the area they wanted to live in, on their $1400/month social security. And people were empathetic and defended her. If society has become so inertial and entitled that they are unable to move to areas of greater opportunity even when they have every incentive in the world, as well as the means, to do so then a basic income would likely explode in a giant ball of flame. The idea is not to let you have live as you see fit without ever working, but to enable people to have an extremely modest baseline of means and allow them to live as they see fit within their means. Instead we'd likely just see nonstop articles about $x/month in a basic income doesn't provide enough in [insert absurdly high cost of living area], people protesting for more (protests now subsidized by the funds they're complaining about), and other such nonsense. It could work phenomenally if people were willing to make it work, but it could also just implode society if people saw it not as a stipend but as an entitlement to their desires. In our current state, I expect we're far closer to the latter than the former.