What you and every other BI advocate simply ignores (I don't even know why I'm wasting my breath on this) is that people who remain in the labor pool will not necessarily realize benefits from staying in the pool. Increasingly, they will be supporting more and more people who choose not to join the pool. The percentage of money they earn that they actually get to keep will grow less and less because more of it is going out to pay for people who aren't working. Eventually, a rational actor in the labor pool will ask themselves, "why bother?", and will drop out as well. It's a vicious cycle, not a virtuous one.

A working person in a universal BI scheme is not earning BI + a normal job earnings, they're earning BI + job earning - cost to provide BI for non-productive people.

It's that simple and BI advocacy circles continue to refuse to produce an economic model that even acknowledges this simple truism let alone demonstrates how efficient the remaining workers need to be to both cover their increasingly non-working fellows and gain any benefits worth working for.

More likely, and what usually happens in schemes where earned labor value earned is separated from labor input is that laborers become disincentivized. People who wish to work would simply stop working in the formal economy and maximize value capture by working in an underground economy. This creates a negative feedback cycle as fewer and fewer people take part in the formal economy (where the government can capture and redistribute their production to people who aren't).

This rapidly bankrupts the scheme and turns labor into a punitive action by the state. "We need workers producing capturable value, therefore you must work" and the point of BI is quickly lost.

BI advocates are unable to demonstrate why this isn't simply true and why every single time labor is disentangled from incentives the system goes bankrupt except with the vaguest possible handwaivy nonsense and pronouncements that it simply won't happen under their particular version of the scheme because of no particular reasons at all except for wishes and dreams.

And then Mincome is usually brought up somewhere.

BI models must account for labor drop-out, must account for how this disincentives the remaining labor pool and reduces value capture within the labor pool. "Empowering personal choice" is not a valid model.

"Some will drop-out, but enough will stay." is not a model. How many, what percent? Why that percent? What's the impact of various drop-out rates on various actor models? How much does production need to increase on the remaining labor pool to maintain equilibrium? Is that achievable? What happens to purchasing power when most products become effectively free? What about maintaining growth at x,y and z percentages? If new money supply is introduced to compensate, what impact does this have on inflation? What's the delta from the best-case model to the worst-case? How are both of those extreme models justified by observed and predicted actor behavior? What compensation levers does the government have to incentivize labor participation? What's the degree of input in each and the known and/or expected outcomes? How does each lever's outputs change the previous questions output?

I've never even seen so much as an Excel spreadsheet that models the simplest question I've put here. What happens when drop-out is 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 70%? Is the proposed BI scheme sustainable? Why or why not? What happens in an unsustainable system? Can unsustainable systems be "fixed" and brought back into sustainability? By what means? What happens if there's not full local/national/regional/global participation? How does the scheme compensate for imperfect participation? Has this compensation plan been modeled and tested under previously identified circumstances? If the system becomes unsustainable, what does failure look like? Can hard failures be corrected? How do we adjust to bring unskilled out-of-labor-pool people back into the labor pool in the event of a lack of sustainment and eventual failure?

The modeling isn't hard, it's just tedious and it has to be done or BI will continue to be the butt of economic jokes. BI needs a body of real thought behind it, not hand-waivy well wishing. It needs a cumulative and unimpeachable story to show that it really is a better idea than the ideas we're working off of now. But BI doesn't offer any of that. It offers wishes and naive hopeful dreams of a global population suddenly achieving self-actualization all at once. It's a nice picture, but anybody can write any sort of Utopian fantasy fiction that makes any sort of crazy idea sound workable.

Here's one:
- We all need underwear

- Let's all make underwear

- I've solved supply-demand issues, monetary imbalance, underwear shortages and brought about a golden utopia for all time.

The numbers must work out. Math cannot be fudged by our personal feelings. I've seen HVAC system with better planning documents than any BI scheme.

It's absolutely exhausting to keep explaining this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794247