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- Mr Smith! Good afternoon! I'm so glad you could come visit me. Please sit down and tell me: how did it go?
Thank you for the well-illustrated example. This indeed proves another problem with the system. Now I know you'll hate to read this because it smells of socialism, but since BIG is supposed to cover amenities, this can be achieved with a system, similar to the coupon one. You have essentially two currencies, with one covering basic amenities (food, shelter) and the other which we all know and love and which can buy vacations, nice cars, coke and women. Then you can be certain that the income from the state would go only towards amenities and what you earn extra goes to the pleasures in life.
Well, you could have spent those 50 EUR to buy a share and you would have received about 1 EUR a year by doing nothing. That would have been much more of a actual step towards your project of basic income.
It very much depend on your lifestyle. Also, I do not only live on dividends. I have other financial assets. That's not the issue anyway.
Thing is, the way I see it, share and stock markets are the only thing that could fulfill the function you are promoting. It is basically designed for that: allowing people to share the excess of wealth produced by companies. The only feature that does not fit your concept, is that shares and stocks are not evenly distributed. So most people can not live on dividends because they just do not own enough shares. And yet, globally if the wealth is somewhere, it is there.
So what's the way to make this distribution more even? Do you have to steal to people who have some, in order to give to people who do not have any? It won't work: you're a living proof of that. If you don't have shares, it's not because you can't, it's because you don't want to. You prefer giving money to political organizations.
So if I invested these 50 EUR, I would get 1 per year. Let's scale that. If I invested 50 EUR today, and don't touch it, I will get 134 EUR in 50 years. If I keep investing 50 EUR every year, after 50 years I'll have 4591 EUR. And in 50 years inflation would have diminished that value significantly. I much prefer giving the money for a cause I believe in.
My point is that to live off a seed capital, you need a significant amount to start with. I'm happy for you that you have that, but many people don't and never will, since they have to pay bills while working on a minimum-wage job. I can have shares, but that's not going to help me if I don't inherit a decent amount of money in the first place. Since I am not lucky enough to have rich parents, I will have to work for my living, which is OK, because I definitely won't make minimum wage with my qualifications. So to summarize, a life in which I can live off interest from my savings is not a possibility, no matter if I give some money to a party or not.