«The problem comes when people choose to do something destructive.»

That's what we have disincentives such as the debt enforcement and the legal system already in place for. If someone spends all of their basic income on drugs rather than shelter/food, they likely commit a dumb sort of suicide or wind up in the prison system.

The point of basic income is that you should have (as with any income) the opportunity to make mistakes like that. For one reason, I don't want to stop someone from using all their basic income on alcohol, because maybe I'll have a nice job with good wages that meets my basic needs and the basic income goes straight into my budget line item that reads "Top shelf bourbon"... More importantly, basic income works best when it is unqualified and unmonitored and real money: it can have the most economic impact if yes, some of it is sometimes going to even the sketchiest of corner liquor stores. That corner store is still going to have a local economic impact.

Adding a work requirement doesn't stop someone from doing something personally destructive. (In some cases it is likely to incentivize personal destruction; a bad job can cause suicidal thoughts or more inclination to do drugs.)

Of course, there's the question of larger scale societal destruction beyond personal destruction: how you stop someone from spending all their basic income on gas to burn and pollute? Ultimately that's a larger failure in the way we operate our economy that maybe we should fix at the sources (we need a better gas tax; we need carbon cap and trade).

«I also wouldn't have a problem with people taking their basic income but not contributing to society.»

Then why would you need to bother micromanaging if any or all of them participate in any sort of "work"? Basic income says we don't necessarily need to redefine "work": we need to stop caring about it, stop policing it, stop letting the labor market enslave people and telling people that fail in the labor market (for any reason) that they are bad people and deserve the poor lot in life that bad luck or poor circumstance handed them.

A great prospective thing about basic income is that it increases liquidity in the labor market, making it actually a market where both sides (labor and employers) can participate as equals and bargain with some amount of fairness. If people don't need to work for a living, it means employers have to actually compete for their labor. If people have a fallback plan (I'll just live on my basic income for a while) they can more easily and more freely change jobs as they see fit.

Redefining "work" and "requiring" it loses some of the nice qualities of that potentially wonderful liquidity in the labor market.

«From a more practical point of view, there is also the issue of how such a program could ever be adopted. This is the unfortunate reality of American politics. The idea of workfare could be something that the conservative half of the country also supports.»

I certainly wish we had more answers here. Basic income has been removed from American political discussions several times now, by painting it with the use of "Socialism" as a bad word.

We've already managed to get (and have a heck of a time defending every other election cycle) basic income for two particularly innocent and defenseless (used to be) minorities: the elderly and the disabled. We call it "Social Security" and it mostly works rather well, when we aren't cutting or gouging it. But the every eight years or so fights to even keep it in existence keeps us from even mentioning the opposite possibility: expanding it.

"Workfare" isn't the answer here for a compromise because we've also already got it, as a convoluted Frankenstein's monster of compromises: minimum wage, unemployment insurance, EBT/"food stamps", welfare. These are already "workfare" they all already require you to work or actively be seeking work and have all sorts of very stringent requirements about when and how and where you can use them.

The potential beauty for basic income is that it cleans all of that up, and makes Uncle Sam and the State Governments a lot less nanny state. "Here's a check, spend it however you wish" is a lot simpler than "Fill out these forms, maybe you qualify for an audited debit card, here's the approved list of ways to spend it, here's the list of steps to prove you are doing it right and how often you need to do that..."

My biggest hope is that maybe you could get a cross aisle contingent of us whacky socialist liberals and some fellow whacky "smaller government" libertarians to somehow get together and join forces on the concept that merging social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, welfare, food stamps, et al into one, much, much simpler non-nanny-state program of basic income, decreases the size of government and increases (hopefully) the happiness of the people, and then maybe from the edges we might hope to convince the large political middle (although probably not the moneyed "bases" of our two parties)... It's a wonderful fantasy that maybe could happen? I wish someone knew how to get the liberals/socialists and libertarians in the same room together without the money or bullying of the party bases.