There is also a motivational issue -- many people (I suspect) will find it harder to work for a living if they sense that their hard-earned money is taxed and given away to freeloaders.
Potentially, but I'm still interested in my thought experiment. What if
a) It gets better, using some metric of better.
at the same time as:
Even if b) is a larger number than at present, does that matter? It doesn't to me, but my intuition is that there are some people who will not tolerate others being lazy even if that's the optimum solution.
I suspect that Basic Income will be unpopular in some quarters, even if the empirical results are that it works.
Fast forward 30 years, the system has been abused by the people (cheating, not even working the necessary days) and politicians (they lock the votes with those helps, socialist party has been in power for 30 years nonstop at Andalusia, PER has been one of the tools used to achieve that democratic kind of record). The regions is no longer that poor, but has not grown that much either (I am referring to the rural Andalusia, of course the cities and the touristic parts have a competitive economy). The problem is that northern Spain is paying for those helps, and people is fed up with that, as all that money has to be diverted from local projects. For example this sensation of (real) injustice is being used as fuel by the Catalan and Vasc nationalist parties, to ask for the independence.
That´s why I really think it´s that important to monitor this helps. They are necessary to help people to leave poverty behind, but if they are taken as a right to be enjoyed no matter what, people will no longer feel the need to work and give to the community. And after all somebody will have to produce that "right" and that will be and injustice too.
My question is: what's wrong with people just sitting around being lazy?
If the system produced a reasonable outcome for everyone in the country, but you could still see other people being lazy, would this spoil it for you?
It´s better to be less trigger happy, to treat everybody as a person, even when there is always the guy who is going to profit of that. But the addition of all the wrong doing will be vastly inferior this way.
My point is that this kind of programs usually are motivated by ideologies, fixed ideals on how things should be, looking at the world as if it were a fixed photography. People is people, and they´ll adapt to their surrounding, so the system must adapt with them. The problem is that usually the system is set, it works at first (as it was a good idea), and then it´s as it was written in stone. Till it starts degrading and giving problems, then it´s scrapped and condemned as a bad idea, and the cycle starts again.
That's already an assumption that could be challenged. We now don't deem someone who's unwilling to work from sun up to sun down in the rice fields as lazy or unethical, but 300 years ago that might have been the case. Why? Because now a few people grow our food so efficiently that most people can afford to be "lazy" and work 40 hours a week in an office job, or at least an air-conditioned job.
Fairness matters.