Comment by saghm

If you think that literally no one is motivated by making more money than the minimal amount they need to survive, how do you explain rich people who still work? UBI isn't a proposal to make salaries illegal, so the problem of "how do we financially motivate people to work" isn't going to change if people happen to get a subsistence wage without employment. The assumption that there's a binary of "people will either be motivated to work or they won't" is nonsensical; there's a entire spectrum of what motivates different people (and how much they're motivated by them). Some people who work now might stop under a system of UBI, but plenty still would continue to. There's a fair question about what the correct amount of money for this is to balance things properly, but without the flawed assumption that motivation is a binary, I don't think the answer is nearly as obvious as you imply.