> That might be true if minimum wage were $1/day (PPP adjusted).

PPP adjusting $1/day from the third world countries in which people live on it is approximately the minimum wage. If you live in the poorest parts of the world, you may have no money, but there is open land. You can construct some kind of hovel to live in. You live an agricultural or hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You buy poor quality food from unregulated sellers. It isn't fun, but it's cheap.

You can't do that in an American city. There is no land where it is legal for you to build a shelter, so you rent. There is no land for you to grow food or hunt game, so you buy food from a store. The store is not allowed to sell you unregulated food for a discount. That is certainly much easier than the way it is in the third world, but it is also much more expensive. You can't live on $1/day in New York City, no way no how. Depending on charity or welfare doesn't count -- that isn't living on $1/day, it's just sending the bill to someone else.

There is also the matter that there is more to being alive than not starving or freezing to death. "Living wage" doesn't mean the minimum amount you need to carry on breathing for another day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage

> Ignoring the potentially bad incentives this creates for employers, I would generally have no issue with a program that allows the basic jobs to be performed in the private sector with government subsidizing them.

> I do, however, object to paying people to play Call of Duty, which is what a Basic Income is.

I think you're in trouble then. Because if you allow private sector employers to choose what jobs they hire people taking the basic job subsidy to do without the employer having to pay any minimum amount of money, you're inviting someone like me to pay someone who takes the basic job subsidy a trivial amount of money to play Call of Duty with me. And then the government is still paying people to play Call of Duty.

What you're fundamentally up against is the fact that enjoyable jobs (like "play Call of Duty with me") command less in the way of wages than less enjoyable jobs (like "flip these burgers"), because the "employee" prefers to take the enjoyable job and the employer can therefore pay commensurately lower wages. That means in a free market that some people will choose to spend their time doing things you think are frivolous.

Ask yourself this: Why is it so unreasonable that some number of poor people take the basic income and live extremely frugally so that they don't need any other job and can spend their time as they please, but there is no objection when some rich guy who inherited his wealth is permitted to do exactly the same thing and do as he pleases instead of working? Aren't we risking that society become too prosperous and then implode as everyone retires to video games and declines to do any productive work? Isn't this even more problematic in the case of people who earn their wealth, who are demonstrably capable of creating significant economic value but are then allowed to remove themselves from the workforce? If people choosing to play video games instead of working is a real problem then we need to implement Communism at once so that we can extract "from each according to his abilities," right? I want you to understand that you're challenging the efficiency of the market. There is no labor they can perform that anyone is willing to pay more to get them to do than the value they place on playing video games. In that situation, allowing them to play video games is what is supposed to happen, and that's fine because that situation is rare.

> No, I'm assuming most of the people on the BJ will be the people who are currently not in the labor force.

But why do you assume that? What stops people currently in the labor force from choosing the basic job instead of their existing job because they find it preferable in some way or another?

> It's strange how low skill workers are so lazy that they will all switch from McJobs to Basic Jobs just to avoid interviewing, while simultaneously so industrious that if you pay them to play Call of Duty they will instead go get a McJob. What kind of utility function causes this to happen?

1) Someone gets laid off, immediately takes the basic job to continue having income, now they spend 40 hours doing the basic job and have that much less time and substantially reduced incentive to seek out a real job.

2) You aren't paying them to play Call of Duty. You're just paying them. They don't have to play Call of Duty. They don't have to do anything, it's unconditional. Which means they only reason they have to play Call of Duty to the exclusion of all else is if they find nothing superior in life whatsoever, permanently. People soon find that they want more out of life: They want to go outside. They want to own a car so they don't have to schlep everywhere they go on foot. They want to take a vacation to another country, or buy a big screen TV, or live in a bigger apartment, or send their kids to college. But you can't afford those things on just the basic income, so if you want them then you have to go out and find a way to earn more money.

A person can have quite a simple utility function and prefer the basic job to a real job but also prefer a real job to playing Call of Duty all day, because the two are unrelated. If you want more from life than you can buy with the basic income (which is to say anything much more than food and shelter), you have to engage in some kind of activity that produces additional income. Which makes it easy for taking a real job and having spending money to be preferable to playing video games and remaining perpetually poor. Meanwhile you can see how taking the basic job would be preferable to taking a real job, because they're substantially similar (you do something you don't like in exchange for money) and the basic job has the further advantage that you don't need to do any work to get it. It may also have other advantages depending on what the real job would be: It may be that the real job requires you to buy something to do it which comes out of your wages (e.g. gas for a sales job that requires travel), or requires doing something you hate (e.g. putting up with unreasonable customers or bosses), or any of the long list of things that can make a job suck. People with low paying jobs of that nature can easily prefer the basic job to the even crapper private sector job, while still preferring both to the prospect of having less income.