It feels like, rather than a basic income, we need two orthogonal currencies:
one for necessities (food, rent, utilities) and one for niceities. Everyone
would just have two numbers in their bank account, for each of the country's two
official currencies. Basic income would be paid in one, while all income from
trade in the economy would be in the other.
I think this would be bad, as you limit a persons ability to choose and as such you're limiting freedom by government planning. Basically as was described by F. A. Hayek in his book "The Road To Serfdom":
… that in a planned society "political democracy can remain if it confines itself to all but economic matter". Such assurances are usually accompanied by the suggestion that by giving up freedom in what are, or ought to be, the less important aspects of our lives, we shall obtain greater freedom in the pursuit of higher values. On this ground people who abhor the idea of a political dictatorship often clamour for a dictator in the economic field.
The arguments used appeal to our best instincts and often attract the finest minds. If planning really did free us from the less important cares and so made it easier to render our existence one of plain living and high thinking, who would wish to belittle such an ideal? If our economic activities really concerned only the inferior or even more sordid sides of life, of course we ought to endeavour by all means to find a way to relieve our- selves from the excessive care for material ends, and, leaving them to be cared for by some piece of utilitarian machinery, set our minds free for the higher things of life.
Unfortunately the assurance people derive from this belief
that the power which is exercised over economic life is a power
over matters of secondary importance only, and which makes
them take lightly the threat to the freedom of our economic
pursuits, is altogether unwarranted. It is largely a consequence of the erroneous belief that there are purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life. Yet, apart from the pathological case of the miser, there is no such thing. The ultimate ends of the activities ofreasonable beings are never economic. Strictly speaking there is no "economic motive" but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends.
What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the "economic motive" means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends. If we strive for money it is because it offers us the widest choice in enjoying the fruits of our efforts. Because in modern society it is through the limitation of our money incomes that we are made to feel the restrictions which our relative poverty still imposes upon us, many have come to hate money as the symbol of these restrictions. But this is to mistake for the cause the medium through which a force makes itself felt. It would be much truer to say that money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man, a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.