&gt;<i>But limiting who you give it to seems to go against the whole concept of basic income. At which point you might as well call is a scholarship. And those have been around for years.</i><p>The differences are:<p>a) Scholarships are given to an extremely small percentage of the population. They are not just excluding &quot;drug dealers&quot; or &quot;terrorists&quot; (which anyway are insignificant in number compared to the general population too, especially the latter, we&#x27;re talking less than .000001%), they exclude almost everybody, in the sense than less than 1% of the population ever gets a scholarship.<p>b) Scholarships are meant for specific time limited periods. Basic Income would be for life.<p>c) Scholarships are given for specific purposes (e.g. to study, to create an art work, etc). Basic Income is just given for no specific task.<p>So, yeah, while both share the fact that &quot;who gets it&quot; will be limited (e.g. no Basic Income to prisoners or millionaire), other than that, they are completely different things. Salary is also given with certain limitations&#x2F;provisions, but nobody confuses it with scholarship or basic income either.