A Guaranteed Income for Every American

That isn't a problem. You get a concentration of people collecting a basic income who move into a low cost area, then they have money to buy housing and food and so on so there are jobs needed to construct housing and sell food, so then some of them get those jobs. Then they have even more money which leads to even more jobs etc. and soon enough the low cost area isn't so low cost, but that isn't a problem anymore because now they have jobs.

I did consider the value of leisure time, which I arbitrarily set to $100/hr (I just called this time, but unsold time can be exchanged 1:1 for leisure time). You seem to be objecting to my assumption that the marginal value of time is constant for the workers. I agree with this objection (in fact, I raised it myself in the footnote). However, even without this simplifing assumption, there are still situations where selling ones time is a net positive.

>By restricting the entire world to the two actors wanting to produce one X one can keep money out of the equation.

My entire argument can be made without invoking money. Indeed, I believe the non monetary form is more compelling, but also more abstract. Again, I will invoke the idea indifference. We say that things X and Y have equal value to person A if she is just as happy receiving 1 X as she is receiving 1 Y. With this concept we can replace "money" with any object of value and have an equivalent analysis. Of course, the selected object would itself have diminishing returns, but this is equivalent to an increasing marginal value of ones time, which I have already addressed. Ultimately, to properly explore this route, I would formalize an abstract notion of "utility" as an equivalence class over indifference. I hope this explanation makes sense, doing it properly would take far to much effort to put into an internet comment.

>where is this money coming from, From selling the X to the society?

The above framework provides a nice way to sidestep this issue. Let U be the utility function. So U(5 hours) is the value of 5 hours of time. [0]. For simplicity, assume that A and B share a utility function.

Suppose that A and B are not selling X, but rather using it themselves (for simplicity, suppose that X is a widget that A and B can share without conflict). We know that X is worth at least 2 * U(5 hours). Suppose that 2 * U(5 hours) > U(8 hours). In this case, by my previous argument, it would be preferable for A to do all of the work, and B to barter something worth between U(8 hours) - U(5 hours) and U(5 hours) for his share of X.

Ultimately, this argument is just a rediscovery of the value of trade and specialization. To translate a minimum wage into this framework, we would define some artificial lower bound for the compensation A needs to be provided in a trade such as this. If this minimum value is less than U(8 hours) - U(5 hours) or U(5 hours), then we are just influencing how wealth gets distributed between A and B. However, if the minimum value to big, than the above trade is prohibited, even though we have seen that it is strictly beneficial.

>will this raise the price or decrease the monetary value of an hour of work?

What do you mean by "monetary value of an hour of work". Returning to a more realistic employer/employee example, there are two important monetary values: the value the employee gives to an hour of work, and the value the employer gives to an hour of work.

From the employer perspective, the value of an hour of work is V(X)/T, where V(X) is the value of X [1], and T is the time spent making it. V(X) is independent of how long it took to make, which means that as the work takes longer, the value of an hour goes down to the employer.

From the employee perspective, the issue is a question of their utility function. Assuming a reasonable utility function, I would expect the marginal value of an hour to increase to the employee. That is to say that the employee needs more money to be indifferent to working the last 2 hours than she does for any of the prior 2 hours. If this is the case, than the value of an hour to the employee goes up with the time.

[0] More formally, U(5 hours) is the equivalance class of objects for which the person would be indifferent to spending 5 hours of time to obtain.

[1] Or rather, V(X) is the labor-excluded profit of X.

The easy way to do this is to give people a one-time election between social security and the basic income, so that nobody can object that they're not better off. Anybody who isn't at or close to retirement will choose the basic income because it begins paying immediately, the lifetime payments are higher and they wouldn't have to pay social security tax anymore. Then in 20 years or so there would be no one left on social security and it could be discontinued.

> Similar problems with Medicaid, it's worth a lot more than $3,000 to the people that are getting it (mostly because children).

It seems like your argument is that we can't do it because there are a relatively small number of people who would be better off under the existing system. But by that logic we could never change anything, even if the net benefits are very large, as long as there is anyone who is better off under the status quo.