Basic income or negative income tax are great ideas: they're cheaper to administer than the current welfare state, are more humane (people are treated as adults and allowed to spend the basic income on whatever they wish), and avoid perverse incentives. With the current system, getting a job easily has the same impact as a 100% tax -- all benefits go away, all income goes goes to deal with lost benefits (and free time goes to -- given this is an entry-level and menial/service job -- an activity that's not intrinsically rewarding).

Yet, people have (initially surprising to me) visceral reactions against these proposals -- despite these proposals coming from all over the political map -- as unfair.

Jonathan Haidt has an excellent article on morality of fairness:

http://www.democracyjournal.org/28/of-freedom-and-fairness.p...

In short, individuals see fairness on a scale -- from "what people receive should be proportional to what they contribute" to "from each according to his ability, to each according their means".

It also makes sense to add a slightly more nuanced pole to this, namely "just desserts": "people should be able to keep everything that they earn, with the exception of fees for services they use and externalities they impose on others"; in other words, fairness concerns should also be balanced against negative liberty.

This could explain why there's such strong opposition to a basic income: significant chunk of the population people see it as less fair as opposed to more fair, another chunk views it as just another form of theft. It's also why many aren't easily bothered by supposed excesses of idleness of the rich, as long as the wealth was acquired legitimately. This isn't to endorse these views, but to acknowledge that these positions are sincerely held by individuals of all races, genders, and incomes.

This is also why many of the wealthy vote for politicians that (on paper) promise to reduce wealth inequality and one of the reasons why many of the poor vote for candidates that don't think inequality is a problem. In short, these are moral views as opposed to matters of rational self-interest.

Contrary to Marx not everyone is fighting for their class interests, contrary to popular view of economics (which is different from how economists actually see it) not everyone is trying to maximize their own net worth by any means possible. Economists say individuals try to maximize their utility, which to nearly all means -- to some extent -- wanting to see good in the world, but with their own definition of what is good.

So here's a proposal: when speaking on inequality and social justice, let's identify who the audience is, and justify policy proposals according to their values. If someone is a libertarian, address the negative effect concentration of wealth (which often begets political power) has on liberty (e.g., politicians buying their way into office to push Nanny state policies, wealthy funding campaigns that lead to criminalization of vice, etc...)

Likewise, if someone cares about proportionality, point out that labour theory of value is false: law of supply and demand means it's inevitable that people will get rich as result of sheer luck or doing something that seems trivial. That's not to mention that many of the wealthy are wealthy as result of rent-seeking -- and fight both rent-seeking and the inequality it leads to.

Otherwise, quite frankly, these ideas will remain dead in the water politically.

Edit: one thing that should be noted is that it's unlikely that in a free market (which is generally a good thing) wealth distribution will be anything other than power law (which isn't to say we can't smooth it out, but we can't turn it to a normal probability distribution). However, wealth isn't everything: why not divorce wealth from status (to the extent, we already do this)? For example, Silicon Valley (it's getting hard to use that term non-ironically, unfortunately) does tend to praise the value of individual contributors as well as that of entrepreneurs and managers, yet there's disconnect in mainstream culture -- where remaining an individual contributor (or even a mid-tier manager) is _not_ considered a successful outcome. This change will have to happen organically, of course.