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You still aren't listening to the point about low value work. Do you want to be in a military with armed people behind you who have no interest in being there,

You still aren't listening to the point about low value work. Do you want to be in a military with armed people behind you who have no interest in being there, doing a good job or your welfare? Conscription is a horrible failure of a policy and there is no logical point trying to bring it back for any reason. Bringing it back to force people who don't want to be in paid, productive work to work for free is a terrible, terrible idea. The main advantage of a basic income/negative tax system is that you just pay people and send them one their way, you don't administer it or waste effort on bureaucracy you just accept that there is some slack in the system.

rdl 13y ago
Training the entire populace in basic civil defense or "pre military" skills is a win because they use those skills in daily life. You wouldn't actively call them up except in a draft situation, and at that point you evaluate, train, and direct them. But basic stuff like "if you are on fire, stop drop and roll" or whatever is useful to have widely disseminated. The other advantage of paying people for being trained and theoretically available is it gets around the "moral" objection to basic income unfairly paying people to do nothing.