I think the basic argument for testing this is that in the future it might very well be the case that only a small portion of society can do "meaningfull work". Think of an AI future or a vastly automated one.
Sure one solution is pushing the wages of say a factory worker up so it's enough to sustain them. In reality we'll probably reach a point where lots of manual labor jobs shouldn't rationally be done by humans. It's a very hard problem to solve imo and naive "comperative advantage though" isn't the answer.
I mean I can see a ton of reasons against base incomes but I also don't see many good answers for a scenario where say half the currently working population could be "optimized away".
Sure one solution is pushing the wages of say a factory worker up so it's enough to sustain them. In reality we'll probably reach a point where lots of manual labor jobs shouldn't rationally be done by humans. It's a very hard problem to solve imo and naive "comperative advantage though" isn't the answer.
I mean I can see a ton of reasons against base incomes but I also don't see many good answers for a scenario where say half the currently working population could be "optimized away".