It sounds unworkable more than simply simplistic.
Essentially your premise, or I guess the socialist premise, as I understand it is that all work performed by employees is inherently undervalued because corporate entities retain earnings and distribute this as profit to shareholders or owners - the rentiers.
I don't know how the implementation of a basic income changes the fundamental premise of a corporate entity. It would improve employee bargaining power, shift the supply curve and drive up the cost structure of companies, sure. People would have more money although the cost of goods would presumably rise commensurately.
I don't know that it suddenly means we all own Google.
That's not what I'm suggesting. It means that, if people have an idea for a business, they can just form their own. Over time, people own more businesses (or cooperatively own them) and work less for hire. Obviously I'm not saying suddenly all our companies become socialist enterprises overnight.
Rentiers work because they control the means of production, because they accumulate capital, which is needed to build the means of production. Give people capital and they can do it for themselves.
Further, where does the basic income come from to begin with? Taxation on people (and corporations which are ultimately borne by people) I presume.
Yeah. So? Taxation is, like, a pretty normal concept.
I don't particularly think the proposed system works with the way people operate. Which is probably why it's never been shown to work very well.
There haven't been any serious investigations of basic income as far as I know. Vox had an article about this a little bit ago.
I'm not sure why I'd engage in private enterprise where the endgame sees whatever I create distributed to whoever I happen to employ in the delivery?
People engage in private enterprise under heavy tax regimes all the time.
No it won't. You're arguing that workers with basic income will have more capital than investment infrastructure. But all of their income will be going to rent and food.
No it won't. Why would you suggest that? If basic income covers staples, then obviously the proceeds of your labor would be in excess of basic needs and you'd be free to accumulate it.
Why are you optimistic? The history of communism and the empirical evidence for capitalism and scarcity should convince you otherwise.
You're going to need to offer more of an argument if you want this to be a useful comment. I can assure you I am familiar with the basic history of the world and it hasn't changed my position.
There is an entire Wikipedia article on the history of the Venezuelan economy that disagrees with you. The socialist revolution decreased oil production, took homes away from people, increased poverty, and completely hampered Venezuela's ability to bounce back from the global recession even though it's neighbors were fine by 2010. This is because socialism is inherently ineffecient; markets are distributed information systems, and the price is the medium of that information. There is no way for a single entity to have the same collective knowledge as an entire economy. My empirical proof: the Soviet union had no idea what to price things, so they sent researches to Western Europe and copied their prices occasionally.
You're kind of conflating a lot of things here. I'm mostly talking about a social democracy transitioning to a socialist economy. You're talking about a command economy and how it's inefficient in distributing capital. The two are not necessarily linked. For example, if we lived in an America basically like today except that corporations were illegal and all businesses were required to be partnerships between all employees, it would be more or less socialist without eliminating a market economy.
This is actually a tautology and it's because of the way you get rid of coercive labor markets. Capitalism does not exist because people are afraid of starving. It exists because people have wants and desires.
Nonsense. I assure you people have wants and desires under all sorts of economic regimes. Despite what you may learn in school, capitalism is not the logical endpoint of all civilization, just as humanity is not the logical endpoint of all evolution. It's just what's hip right now.
If you give people basic income they just take their extra income and spend it on other things
So? That's their choice. If they want to accumulate capital they can. If they would rather take their wealth out in immediate value that's fine too.
(they won't actually have extra income because of market forces. But I digress).
That's not how commoditization works.
The only way to make our society un-coercive is to remove choice.
I have no idea what this is supposed to even mean.
The point is that right now, if you don't sell your labor, you will starve*. So if I have a job to offer you, and it's onerous or unfair, but you have no other option (even no other convenient option), you have to take the job.
That's coercion!
I would like to get rid of that. If you don't want to sell your labor, you shouldn't have to. That is how a functional free market operates.
* You won't starve, because as the dumpster next to any bakery will tell you, the market price of food is zero. But we'll actively reduce the value of the food by dumping it in the trash and making you humiliate yourself to get it, because, again, it's necessary for capitalism to operate.
