> Rather than artificially fixing the supply of labor at an arbitrary level and penalizing people for their honest work until some give up, it's better to "buy out" the laziest among us. Sure they won't be contributing to society, but at least they won't prevent others from receiving fair compensation which is exactly what happens in the otherwise inevitable race to the bottom.

I feel like you are missing the point that the "bottom" (lazy? I would most likely disagree...lazy + unfortunate genes / birth status / location perhaps) has a much better, easier, fairer chance (in obvious unison with a reduction of unemployment,) given organizations reduce the time worked per day, thus opening up opportunities for currently employed (more leisure time) and the unemployed (the jobless)

That's not to say this model has severe flaws. It's more utopian than what are we faced in capitalist societies now, but goes against business profit maximization, which I'll simplify in a useful manner: organizations like to hire as few people as possible and use as much of their leisure time as possible in order to reduce benefits expected by most workers increasingly expensive benefits that they've come to expect in long term cushy jobs.

The recent uptick in free lance jobs is rough for this very reason. It's less risky to sell most your leisure time to large companies.

That's my personal diagnosis. As for my solution...the the non risk averse must continue(create) their own entrepreneurship endeavors and as the older generation dies out, destroy the [8-9]-[5-6] scourge imbued unto us by unionized industrialists of the past and craft new culture. Keep companies running smoothly with more employees working less time. Any opinions/counterpoints would be appreciated. I'd perhaps be considered an idealist with high expectations of the future.

P.S Long time lurking/reading here on HN and finally beginning to post. Always appreciate the comment threads more than any other web site.

I should have scare-quoted "lazy" to make it more clear that I meant it in the tongue-in-cheek sense.

I'll grant you that the Mandatory Minimum Work Week (MMWW) is a plausible alternative to Basic Income (BI) with two caveats. One, that you would probably want to implement it more as "Mandatory Minimum Vacation" so as to leave alone jobs that fundamentally require time blocks of a certain size and two, instead of a strict rule use progressive fees for violation so that the incentive landscape can accommodate exceptional circumstances. For the sake of brevity let's call this "MMWW+".

> I feel like you are missing the point that the "bottom" has a much better, easier, fairer chance

That's a statement, not an argument. If you can back it up I'd be interested, because the only tiebreaking argument I've heard between BI and MMWW+ favors BI due to efficiency. MMWW+ cuts a swath through the whole labor force resulting in a very uneven effect across professions. Surgeons already make $500k/yr, what will happen if you effectively cut the surgeon labor supply by 10%? Either a huge price shock or they pay the fees for violating MMWW+, and those costs are going to get conveyed right back to the consumer due to relative elasticity. Contrast to BI which effectively identifies the component of the labor force which is cheapest to remove and addresses it in particular while more or less leaving everyone else alone (modulo a small bump towards the mean which you can eliminate if you so choose at the expense of damping marginal incentives somewhere near the bottom).

> [MMWW is] more utopian than what are we faced in capitalist societies now, but goes against business profit maximization

BI, MMWW, MMWW+, and all other alternative schemes run contrary to current vested interests. Since the cost is common to all of them it should not affect an analysis of which one is best unless we have reason to believe that one is significantly more palatable than another. For instance, MI>BI and MMWW+>MMWW but I don't see a compelling reason to believe that MI>MMWW+ or MI<MMWW+.

> The recent uptick in free lance jobs is rough for this very reason. It's less risky to sell most your leisure time to large companies. That's my personal diagnosis.

"Diagnosis" implies identification of a root cause, but that seems more like an effect, and I'm not sure how it fits in to your larger argument.

> destroy the [8-9]-[5-6] scourge imbued unto us by unionized industrialists of the past and craft new culture.

You realize that workdays were longer before the unions forced the "scourge" onto the industrialists, right? They argued for the exact same thing that you argue for, and for the exact same reason.

> the non risk averse must continue(create) their own entrepreneurship endeavors

The single most convincing argument I've heard in favor of BI / MI is that in reduces risks associated with entrepreneurship and lengthens runways, even for professions that don't command a large salary.

Sounds like mandatory maximum rather than minimum? You're limiting from above not from below.

Yep, too late to edit though. It's annoying that they both start with the same letter because otherwise I probably would have noticed :)