&gt; When did it become my responsibility to work harder so that they can do that?<p>That&#x27;s the thing - it isn&#x27;t and won&#x27;t be. Basic Income is designed for, and in fact <i>only works in</i>, civilizations with enough excess productivity that they don&#x27;t have to have their entire population working their assess off to maintain homeostasis and well-being. The USA is <i>just</i> about to get there. Some of the Nordic countries were there probably five or six years ago. There&#x27;s a reason they&#x27;re implementing it before us.<p>BI isn&#x27;t &quot;so that people can sit on their couches and do nothing all day while I support them&quot;. BI is so that people aren&#x27;t required to have jobs to survive. Because when your civilization has sufficiently efficient per-person production, you end up with an issue where you&#x27;re not just overprovisioned, but so overprovisioned that companies <i>must</i> start laying off large portions of the population to avoid wasting money hiring uselessly overproductive employees. At which point you end up with 30% or 60% unemployment and you have to choose between letting a third of your population starve or implementing something like BI.<p>That&#x27;s the situation. BI isn&#x27;t here to make it your responsibility to support everybody. BI is here because it&#x27;s become so easy for people to support others that the economy, which up until now has assumed that there&#x27;ll never be enough support to go around, has fallen apart. It&#x27;s set up so that you can choose to support others instead of taking care of your family, and still have everything make sense.