Hahahah, oh mannnn, this is so far from a reality. There would be too many libs on the fence about it, whilst virtually every conservative would reject the idea outright. I can just see Bill O'Reilly ranting about people sitting on their asses and getting paid for it.

And... I would kind of agree with him. The article is certainly right; there are tens of millions of overly-worked Americans trapped in cycles of poverty. Moms and dad working to support their several children that they couldn't afford to have had, but they're Catholic and uneducated (or whatever other scenario), so can we really blame them? I dunno. But I can guarantee you that if we were to hand out paychecks Oprah style, we would have tens of millions of Americans unmotivated to do anything other than watch TV and post about it on Facebook. It's arguably human nature... if there's nothing chasing you, why run?

I would be all for a "mincome" if there were some kind of criteria wherein you had to demonstrate self-improvement. But how the hell are we going to evaluate that? People would point to finger paintings, terrible haikus, and awful music productions as evidence of their "progress" in life.

Dauphin serves as a poor example for a case study. If they have around 12,000 residents now, I'd wager that they had maybe about 5,000 during the case study in the 1970's (very generous estimate). An isolated town of 5,000 does not scale to an interconnected country of 320 million.

I'd really like to see wealth redistributed more evenly, I really would, but just like every other idealist idea, human nature is just going to shit all over it. Please, I'm all for debate on this, because deep down I want a basic income to work. I just doubt that it would.