There's no "we as society" that can just magically "provide the resources". The resources must happen, i.e. somebody actually needs to do the work. In other words, it's someone's job. There is no feasible way to run a society without people doing the work. In fact, the pandemic has been a good example of this, on so many levels - farmers in UK complaining that the strawberries are going to rot on the fields without immigrant labour (because of border lockdowns), shops almost running out of food (because of supply chain breakdowns, which governments took a lot of effort to protect/reestablish), mask & PPE shortages (because there's not enough people doing the work in factories - particularly in Europe), food deliveries (i.e. someone needs to actually do the work of getting in a car and driving around), ...
Giving people sufficient basic resources for survival doesn't stop them from working.
Everyone being paid more than a living wage is already choosing to do more work than they have to. Why do you assume that people would stop working, if they have a choice? It's already evident that people choose to work without coercion, if they are paid properly.
My point is that coercion via threat of personal destitution is bad and should be eliminated, not that work is bad.
Even if prices rose with everyone guaranteed resources, why would anyone get off their asses to shovel shit when they can sit at home and get paid basically the same?
This is a sort of complete miunderstanding of how your world works. Utterly.
People work for incentives. People on HN work on their startups - why?
They could get a SW job and leave the stress behind, why do they have to struggle?
Some people will take the basics and be happy - thats their call. MANY others will do what it takes to get paid because that is what they want.
So if you aren't getting enough fruit pickers, well pay more. If apparently your going rate isn't high enough, well then those strawberries are perhaps not economically viable in the first place, since no one in your economy wants to do that work.
Obviously its a lot more complex, but the essence of economics is always - people act according to incentives.
Because prices would be so high that you would be unable to pay rent or eat on your monthly “allowance”. You could keep raising the allowance every month and things would soon spiral out of control
This assumes that large landowners and food conglomerates are 100% rentiers.
That the money they make is based on the amount they can extract, and not on the value they provide. You're describing a system which is not democratic capitalism, it is serfdom.
If that were the case, why would we continue to allow that?
