did you even read the article? My impression is that you did not read it, or did not even understood it. Also, you seem to have no idea what communism is about.
We have a certain amount of work that needs to be done, this work takes a certain number of people to do it, call this number X. We have Y people who are willing to do the work.
At the moment, Y>X. If we give a small BI, then Y would decrease. This is not a problem, as Y>X. The question then becomes how how the BI should be. Given our current unemployment rate, the answer is greater than 0.
That is a religious belief. In most developed countries there are more unemployed people than job openings, period. If you waved a magic wand that solves all skill and mismatch problems, forever, and filled every standing job opening, there would still be large portions of the population unemployed and unemployable.
If you think of it in terms of job openings, sure, but that's myopic. I'm thinking of it in terms of the number of people who could be profitably utilized to improve the material well-being of humanity. My notion of the "work that needs to be done" is in no way limited to what current job openings exist. In fact, there's likely an infinite amount of work that needs to be done. The limiting factor is the number of people capable of doing it.
For instance, what if we multiplied by one hundred the number of researchers working on major problems like fusion power or eradicating disease? There isn't anywhere close that number of people qualified to be physicists or medical researchers, though, so it simply isn't considered. There are probably enough unsolved problems in materials science alone to profitably employ twice the number of currently unemployed people for a lifetime, except all those unemployed people are almost certainly incapable of becoming materials scientists.
My job, and likely yours, filled a "job opening" that only existed because someone else did the basic work of building the technology and the infrastructure to enable the creation of that job. The more people you have doing that work, the more job openings pop into existence. Don't think of it in the sense of Google or Amazon having only so many job openings, and once those are filled, that's that. Think of it in the sense of Tim Berners-Lee building something that enabled every single job at Google or Amazon to exist in the first place.
It doesn't even have to be that radical. A healthy, growing company expands at a rate that's eventually limited by the number of people it can hire. Once it hires those people, it expands its operations until it needs more. So even on the most basic level, simply counting job openings misses all the job openings that would be created once the first batch was filled, and so on recursively.
> My notion of the "work that needs to be done" is in no way limited to what current job openings exist.
while in theory this is true, the fact is that the other kind of jobs you referred to (the research positions, etc) are jobs that do not produce results quickly(nor is guarenteed to produce results). And yet, those who work in these jobs needs to be fed, clothed etc. So who provides these resources to keep these people alive while they perform non-productive, exploratory jobs? Basic income _may_, but that just shifts the cost to the entity giving the basic income, instead of the investor who take the risk and profit from the outcome of the research/exploratory work.
The bottom line is, there isn't enough free resources out there to support such endeavours, as much as i like it to be true. Who wouldn't want to have the freedom to do what their passion tells them, be it artistry, scientific research, or social work. But reality is harsh, and the reality is that such people are not needed as much as they think they are.
You're assuming that economic demand for that labor exists, in the form of private enterprises expanding or in the form of some Unspecified Really Really Rich Body, probably the government, just hiring loads of R&D staff and associated workers directly.
Most of the world currently doesn't have the political will, economic growth rates and public budgets to support that kind of practically-limitless demand for labor.
In communism there is no private property. You can't run business or be employed in any.
Minimum income is completely unrelated. It only means giving a few dollars for the poor so they don't starve or freeze to death. It's already done in developed countries (welfare) but in unreliable way.
Minimum income doesn't interfere with free market and accumulation of capital.
Because the money given is not enough to comfortably live on by itself, and definitely not enough to be wasteful. In communism the incentives aren't there because you can't get more money by working harder. With this plan you have all the time in the world to get money by working harder/at all.
If someone blows all their money on drugs they need a rehab facility.
Frankly, this smells of people trying to sneak communism in through the backdoor.
And what do you do when they blow all their money on drugs (this will happen with some of them).