Widerquist

You remind me of the words of Everclear, "those people who love to tell you Money is the root of all that kills. They have never been poor. They have never had the joy of a welfare Christmas." The belief that you know the problems of the poor better than they do is arrogant. It's fantasy. We all want to believe that our privileges are earned. And it's simply not true. There aren't enough high paying jobs for everybody to fill. We have 10s of millions of McJobs in the USA alone. We have 10s of millions of people with no other realistic prospect. The lack of ambition is more often a response than a cause.

To your first question, Say your basic income is $10K. You get offered a job that pays $20K. Say the taxes on a $20K income Are $8K. If you take the job you now have $22K. Your income goes up by $12K. You can now afford better housing, better, food, more luxuries. That is your incentive, and by refusing to to work unless you get much better pay, you are giving all employers the incentive to pay good wages to all employees.

I'll answer the other question separately.

Yes, there is no free lunch. Everything comes from somewhere. But the world today is not a perfect meritocracy. There are millions people around the world--including the wealthiest people in the world--receiving something for nothing all the time. Wealth is reworded with more wealth. If you own a resource, a copy, a piece of land, anything useful, you don't need to do anything to make money off it. Someone else can manage it, and you just collect the returns. If you spend less than the returns, your fortune will grown, and you and your family can continue to become wealthier and wealthier for generations. That is where the money has to come from--from the regular return on capital, the daily free lunches handed out by the way our society distributes ownership.

I'm not sure that not wanting to work and consume more is always and everywhere a bad habit. But there are other people who are in the habit of paying people really low wages and giving them crappy working conditions all to serve their own self-interest. That is always and everywhere a bad habit. We need to break them of that habit by making sure that there are no desperate people who have to take those crappy jobs with crappy wages and awful working conditions. People who have the power to say no to that and to demand a good wage for a days labor.

Wanting to work is a two-way street. Surely you agree that "everyone has their price?" If you've got a problem with people who don't want to work for what you're paying, then pay more until you hit their price. That's the price of freedom.

To your second question, our goods are not created solely by human effort. We can't produce anything without resources. But we don't share our resources. Some people own them. Some are propertyless. Without a basic income a small group of people uses the power of the legal system to take control of all the Earth's resources. Property owners pay each other for control of resources, but--without basic income--they never pay the propertyless for being born into a society where they own nothing. Without basic income their only access to resources is to work for an owner. Basic income is really just paying back for what you take. If you take ownership of resources, you own something back to all the people who are therefore not allowed to use those resources. What you owe is taxes, and those taxes should be paid back to all the people who would otherwise be propertyless. Basic Income is not something for nothing. It is paying back for the resources you take out of the common pool.