Obviously, this proposal only applies to Swiss citizens. Switzerland is a geographically small country. Nearly all of it is within practicable commuting distance from the border. Switzerland has a considered long-term policy of making its guest-workers live in France or Germany or Italy, so that they do not put down roots inside Switzerland. Businesses such as fast-food restaurants are not going to try to recruit Swiss labor– they are going to do their recruiting at the border.

Switzerland does have some curiosities. For example, I understand that in rural districts, they have self-service convenience stores, run on the honor system, so that they don’t have to pay full-time help. In general, Europeans do things with vending machines which we don’t do, because their minimum labor costs are higher.

What Switzerland does represent is a prototype for is e-immigration. Someone doing customer service in Bangalore does not acquire American citizenship by small increments, the way an illegal Mexican immigrant does. The customer service representative in Bangalore does not accumulate American Social Security credits, or anything like that. At certain key points, the United States decided that it did not want to become a slaveholder society as a byproduct of illegal immigration, and issued amnesties for the more settled illegal immigrants, not to mention maintaining the principle of birthright citizenship. At any rate, the Swiss have been confronting the idea that nearly any kind of work can be done from outside, at wages which reflect only a small fraction of the national standard of living.

Take the fast-food strikers. They are easily replaced, but their strength lies in the fact that a lot of customers won’t cross a picket line, at least, not to get a hamburger (*). In the same situation, e-employees would simply be unplugged, and replaced within a few minutes from a central e-labor repository, and there would be nothing much they could do about it.

(*) Wal-Mart customers fall into a different category, obviously.

This is an interesting discussion . To be honest , i don’t see happening this very soon . Out of 100’s of countries , only handful of them are very rich and their citizens have the privilege to stay at home and take rest and citizens of other countries have to work very hard to earn each penny that supports their family .

From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed. A century of economic history proves nothing!

Everybody needs a certain income to live. Anyone who does’t earn it by paid labor or capital has to make it somehow. Many people do so by various means:

– family members (housewives, children, the poor brother-in-law one occasionally shelters and feeds, …)
– state subsidy (student loans, social security, …)
– charity (organized and private)
– crime

To grant a basic income guarantee is to remove the dependance on those alternative methods of getting an income. The cost of it therefore has to be weighed against the benefit of getting rid of of those (no social security bureaucracy, working family members can afford to work for a lower wage to feed their families, tax-exempt and potentially ideologically problematic charities won’t be needed anymore, poverty-driven crime and the need to fight it should decrease).

Every dollar one earns one can keep (not like some detractors claim, that up to the basic income every dollar goes to the state, which creates a very bad incentive structure), but a consumption tax (basically vat) of about 50% would pay for the basic income.

prices need not be fixed because the amount of money in circulation doesn’t change and yes, some unpleasant jobs would probably see rising wages, while other wages might decrease.

a basic income would mean everyone’s basic needs are taken care of while anything above (and most people will want to have more than that, just as they do now) is subject to an unfettered and thus more efficient labor market.

entrepreneurship is encouraged because neither minimum wages nor statutory periods of notice for workers are needed anymore.

it is an economically sound idea that has to be seriously investigated before it can be dismissed. Merely calling it socialism is by no means a valid critique. Just as with reform of so-called intellectual property rights the main problem is our obsession with “freeloaders”, in that we’d rather put in place a much worse system rather than to allow even an insignificant amount of freeloading. as if one cheater discredited the whole idea of social security. as if one plane crash discredited the entirety of passenger air travel.