Or some form of socialism. Even a guarantee of some minimal income, even for the unemployed, should do the trick. With this method, you can think of the economy as a sliding scale of jobs that need to be done, and people willing to do them. As you increase the minimum income, you decrease the people willing to do the jobs, and as you decrease the minimum income you increase the people willing to do the jobs. The trick is to find the income that makes the two numbers equal. Now, as technology allows people to work more efficiently, the economy can support a higher effective minimum income.

We can see how this could work even in our current system. At the moment, we have people willing and able to work who cannot. If we start giving every citizen some amount of money, either the unemployed will stop wanting to work, or the employed will decide that they would be happier working less because the additional money is no longer worth their time.

Interesting point. Thinking it through for myself, it seems important that the money be sent to everyone, not just the unemployed. Otherwise you'd get a weird situation where taking a job might not increase the amount of money you make - or even decrease it, if the rule is that you only get money if you have literally zero income. Giving money to everyone makes it much easier to view jobs as a sort of sliding scale where you work harder and get more money.

Alternatively, you could set the minimum wage such that every job pays more than the base wage. But you'd still need a rule to deal with part-time work.

We do already have this problem with high marginal tax rates (counting the drop in available welfare as part of that 'marginal tax') at the border between unemployed/low-income/middle class. This article gives some good examples of where it happens currently: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/effective-m...

The other side of that same problem is that people who fall into lower levels of income have a very hard time proving they deserve access to the meager welfare programs that keep the permanently destitute from burning down society in a fit of lumpenproletarian rage.

And where would the money for this "minimum income" come from? It's either printed, which simply inflates prices, or it's taken from the people who are actually working, which is not only a disincentive for them to work but also causes them to be resentful of the people who are sitting around on their couches being given an income.

Socialism doesn't work. It's against human nature.

If you read my post, you will see that distinctiveness people from working is half of the point. Our current problem is that our population is currently willing to do X amount of work, but we only have Y amount of work to do. If we make income (which I am using as a proxy for 'stuff') directly proportional to how much work you do, then a small percentage of the population will attempt to gain as much economic power as possible leaving the rest of the population without. If we decouple income from the amount of work you do, then we do not have sufficient incentive to work, and do not have enough stuff to go around (although I think we will reach a point where this is no longer true). If we have a minimum income, we can increase it until our workforce still has the capacity to do all the work available, but does not have such a surplus in capacity that people who want to do more work but cannot find any do not suffer. If we get to the point where their is work that is not being done, we would need to decrease minimum income.

The resentment you are speaking about is a cultural problem that would simply need to change along with society. Also, in my basic implementation of this system, every individual would receive the minimum income in addition to whatever they receive from their job.

The alternative is that we keep increasing the amount of work we need to do. Unfourtuantly, work is expensive and a key strength of capitilism is that it encourages minimizing the work that needs to be done. I believe a minimum income is a comprimise that maintains an economy that improves efficiency by being capitalistic at the micro level, while at the same time providing the best quality of life it can support to all of its citizens. If it ever falls into pure socialism, it would be because everyone is content.

Here's a notion for us to think about: why not start structuring a basic-income system in a "capitalist" way by reforming the way companies pay out dividends?

I mean, how does it make sense that, on the one hand, American business corporations are sitting on record-sized heaps of cash, but on the other hand, most gains for investors are made via buy-low, sell-high capital gains and almost all stock is owned by the investor-capitalist class, institutions, and retirement accounts? Why not transform our existing paper certificates that theoretically place a legal claim on a stream of profits into a real, enforceable claim on a stream of profits?

So we could maintain our notions of "labor" and "deserving" by radically shortening the lifespan of a person's mandatory career. You work until you build enough wealth to start living off capital income, then "retire" into the rest of your life with a standard of living that remains linked to the work you actually did. A sovereign wealth fund could distribute social dividends through ownership of society's common assets for those who don't have much else.

Practically, how would a minimum income even be feasible? There are ~250m adults in the country, and ~150m are employed. If all adults got a minimum salary of $25k, you'd have to tax every employed adult $40,000 to pay for it (in addition to the normal taxes that pay for government). It wouldn't be worth working, so you'd just drop out and collect the check, which would increase the burden on those still employed causing even more to drop out.

True, so the minimum income would not be $25k. Consider that 23k is considered the poverty line for a family of 4. If currently employed people decide that it is no longer worth their time to work, then we still do not have a problem, because we have plenty of people who not only think it is worth their time to work, but do not currently have work. Surely one of them would be willing to take your job.

Well what do you think the minimum income might be?

The labor problem is much more complicated than: there are more people than want jobs than jobs available. The unemployment rate for people with bachelors degrees is now down to 3.7%. My leaving the labor force isn't going to help a high school drop out who use to manufacture furniture in North Carolina.

You probably nationalise the robots and we all get dividends not salaries.

You're missing something: the people who are currently working don't always want to work as much as they're working.

So yes, you could get low-productivity workers transitioning off their 30-hour barrista workweeks to sit at home drinking their own damn coffee.

However, the threat of workers leaving their jobs for a guaranteed income would also improve the terms of bargaining for highly-skilled professionals. So imagine a computer programming or scientific research profession (to name my own fields) where we stop working 50-to-60-hour weeks all the damn time!

Imagine a software engineer who can actually say to their boss, "Give me comp-time when I go over 40 hours/week, or I'll quit and collect a government stipend while writing open-source code that will advertise me to my next employer, who will treat me rather more nicely!" When you think about it, it's really quite similar to what we have on a very-hot job market right now, with employers at least claiming to offer unlimited vacation or half-time, work-from-home programming jobs (I actually saw one of those advertised just this month on Hacker News) because there's just that much demand for software engineers that employers have to take their licks, at least until the current crop of college kids graduates.

So yes, Basic Income Socialism runs against the human tendency to not want to subsidize lazy other people. However, it also brings the benefit that hard workers get better bargaining terms for reaping the rewards of their/our labor.

You don't actually need socialism to have a minimum income. Instead, you could institute some form of Georgism. The total land value of the US (not including any improvements) was estimated to have been a bit over 5 trillion USD in 2000 ( http://www.lincolninst.edu/subcenters/land-values/price-and-... ). Allowing for growth, call it 20K per capita. The distortions in real estate markets are left as an exercise for the reader.