Some good points, Seriati, and thanks for referencing specific passages. I'll do my best to address them.
I don't for instance think that a need to make people toil is a primary motivation of resistance, you're extrapolating that idea from a very different circumstance, one where giving one group of people something for free has uniformly only be accomplished by taking it from others.
Here, I suppose, we disagree. Any time there is a condition whereby parasitism is causing one group to benefit from the labor of another there is an inherent interest in keeping the latter group working. Similarly, any time a group finds themselves relatively privileged and sees their state as being higher than that of others I think they tend to resist a balancing of fortune. I think the attitude of "no one's going to take my stuff" is a very real one, even if in reality everyone would have 'enough' when all is said and done. What is enough? It's all relative, isn't it. That's a very important question to investigate, I think, and so I won't pretend that it's a simple topic to address.
Okay, who's paying for the machine? Is it free? Is it just confiscating the land and resources it needs to operate? Are you compensating the former owners? Is anyone granted an interest in it's output? Whether it be owners, or governmental authorities?
That's the whole point of the hypothetical. The question of the ownership of the methods of production (in other words, profiting from being the one to own production) becomes irrelevant when human labor isn't required. You don't need to know who 'owns' the products of human labor because there is no human labor. Asking whether the machine is "free" is like asking right now whether the sunlight is "free." It's available and it's there. Of course, it's certainly possible to forcibly
prevent someone accessing the products of such a machine, or of sunlight, but that's not the same as asking if they're free.
I can't envision any circumstance where I would require people to participate in busy work. Let alone one where it was utterly pointless on top of being busy work.
Cool

Restricting access implies I'd be denying something they have a right to access. You're implication is that the fruits of the machine belong to all as an entitlement. Is that the case? Did no one have to sacrifice or pay for the machine? Is it taking no one's resources without compensation?
The notion of entitlement is an interesting one because it implies that people have a right to a thing. This comes at it from the angle that they naturally don't have it and are asking for it, and implies they must have some reason (e.g. a right) for thinking they should be given it. But now think of it from the other side; what if there is a resource that the machine would just freely give to all without being asked for it. Now the question is not why the people have a right to ask for it, but rather why someone would have the right to deny it to them. Do you see how this simple reformulation turns the old notion of entitlement on its head? Now, this doesn't mean giving each person infinite of anything, but it can mean giving an arbitrary amount depending on how much there is to give. I guess you could call this a right, insofar as I guess it needs asserting that all people equally deserve to make use of the world's resources.
They'd only grant access based on useFULL labor. Now you've posited, in this hypo, that no such thing exists anymore. There's no useful labor to be done. Sure there may be artistic labor, or other labor that improves lives, but there's nothing left that has to be done.
You got it.
What then for the people that decide to do nothing?
That's the funny part. Based on how we're used to living it seems that we'd have to worry about what those people are doing. But actually I don't think you have to. What if you just...let them do whatever they want within the confines of the law? What is 'wrong living' when production capacity is no longer an issue?
I think, however, you ignore that such an existence, ie a fundamentally pointless one, may actually be unhealthy for human beings. It's not an accident that heavily subsidized life, goes hand in hand with drug use, crime and disrespect for other humans (and this occurs in trust fund babies as well as the impoverished).
This is a very important point to both make and address. At a fundamental level, if you believe in small government, personal choices, and any kind of libertarian mindset of keeping the government out of people's personal lives, then this question is actually straightforward to answer: don't decide for others what is best for them or how they should live. And for someone of the more liberal/social-net mindset, then I think the argument would be that rampant drug problems aren't a result of leisure time, but rather a result of stresses put on people by their meagre subsistence on welfare and on the pressure to find a job when they feel they don't really have any hope of making a decent living. First of all I firmly believe that easing drug laws reduces drug use rather than increasing it (and the data is now bearing this out). Secondly, I think that a lot of lifestyle problems at present are a result of unhealthy social and economic factors more so than some kind of basic human frailty. Some people would probably become addicts in any society, but I personally don't think it would be that many. And for those that do have a problem I think in a society of leisure there would be many caring people who would offer services to help them.
But as far as 'healthy lifestyle' goes, unless you think the government should dictate what sort of lifestyle a person should have based on a pre-determined script then I say let individuals and communities worry about their lifestyle and keep the systemic considerations out of that. I don't think having people work or not work should be based on whether someone arbitrarily thinks they
ought to to employed, for their own good. I know you may not be suggesting this, but I am convinced many people do think along these lines. The question is not what you suspect would be healthy or unhealthy for others, but rather whether you would employ force to require others to live in a way that you considered healthy. If not, then the systemic consideration should be made bereft of this consideration and it should be assumed that generating leisure is invariably a good thing (whether or not it actually is for every single person).
Or you believe that such a machine's output would be controlled by the powerful, or fought over by the desparate, in which case you may also think about it differently.
Yes, careful precautions would need to be in place to prevent this. The whole concept is to evaluate production capability and to get away from the notion of someone personally owning or controlling production to benefit themselves at the expense of others.
In any event, if the machine did suddenly appear, and someone didn't have to be paid for and managed not to take anyone's resources to operate, then distribution could be one question. Though if you can build this great of a machine, why don't you have it distribute the resources too?
I would. But people would have to decide how to calibrate its choices. Obviously we don't want to live under the rule of a master AI. It would merely be a mechanical device that was very efficient.
You could just ask the question, if Manna fell from the skies everyday, what would happen? Pretty sure we'd stop farming. A bunch of people would stop all manner of other activities too.
Funny enough, as production capability increases this is more or less the scenario we would be approaching, plus or minus dramatic flair. So what
would you say to the notion of manna falling from the sky? If you could make that happen, would you?
And you don't see that as creepy? To avoid the "unfairness" you're going to control people's reproduction?
In a way, but not much creepier than telling people to spay and neuter their pets or to remember to responsibly use birth control. I'd never advocate outright dictating to people how many children they can have; it would be up to them either way, but with systemic incentives in place a person could decide how much their care about reproducing a lot versus a little. In point of fact this system is already in place unofficially, since birth rates in developed countries always get whittled down to much lower rates than in less industrialized countries. The reason is simple: when children are too expensive and don't directly contribute to labor people don't have a lot of them. In rural, agrarian cultures having lots of kids increases the worker base; in a modern city they are mostly just an expense, almost like choosing to buy a luxury item. There is also the factor of time to raise them, where now working parents don't have the time to raise many children due to work. In a post-work culture this factor would be gone, and so the economic factor would have to be the principle lever.
Basic income is simply a prototype of a system of rationing resources based on available supply and production capacity.
I disagree. Basic income has no relationship to your "wonderful" machine. The equivalent is closer to what we have now, with food stamps, in fact the closest analog would be if the government hand delivered a "standard" grocery order to each persons house. No luxuries, no choices, no preferences honored, everyone, vegan's included, gets there two pounds of hamburger, etc.
The thing that I think need to be clarified here is that I see a basic income as a stepping stone, not as the final answer. I agree that mixing a basic income with a market-capitalist system is sloppy and is a bit of an awkward fit. However I also think that it's the only clean way to shift the system over to whatever needs to come next without major strife.
You don't get to the Star Trek economy by flooding the world with free money. You get there by taking the money away.
Some people, myself included, see two possibilities, both of which require a fundamental revolution to eventually end the current system. One is a hot (violent) revolution, and the other a cold (peaceful) one. I do not want a hot revolution, as exciting as that sounds. "Taking away" people's money would certainly result in violence in my opinion, as those who were in a dominant or superior position previously will not take the potential change in system quietly. But if you ease the system in so that step by step the general spreading around of resources becomes the new normal it can transition quietly so that at some point it almost seems obvious to everyone to complete the transition. But if you keep things as they are now, or even worse, revert to a setup closer to true capitalism, it
will derail in a bad way and cause mayhem. I'm totally in agreement with D.W. about this.
You can see it in every communistic country, you can see it in socialistic medical countries, you can really see it everywhere you take the incentive out of innovation. That's basic psychology, it applies universally, take away incentives and behavior reduces.
There has never been a communistic country. Actually I'm not even advocating communism, because that's about the state controlling the methods of production and the products of labor. I am quite against that. Any so-called communist country we've ever seen has either been a statist-capitalist hybrid, or else a dictatorship that employed certain terminology as an effective state religion (such as the USSR). But the main limiting factor in even these statist nightmares from working was production capability, of which they had almost none. My hypothesis erases this problem.
Don't tell me you've fallen into Pyrtolin's fake money camp. Budgets are balanced because the alternative is to degrade you're money supply, and there are actual limits to that. It's no mistake that the US has been under persistent inflation for more than 50 years.
The issue isn't about whether fiat currency functions or not, but whether in its employment it's used to enrich some while oppressing others. As it stands the current fiat system has been used for ill purposes, however as a pure mechanism there's nothing wrong with establishing arbitrary credit systems so long as they are tied down to some reality. You're right insofar as the way money is employed now is frequently not tied down to reality and used as funny money. Making the currency 'mean something' is important, but I think there are many ways to do that which haven't been explored yet.
How's your idea really all that different than letting everyone carry around a pad of paper and just write their own currency when ever they feel they need it? Do you really believe that such a system would work? And that people would honor that currency, that they'd trade if for their real goods?
If a person is 'entitled' (as you put it) to a certain amount of stuff, they can either take it or leave it. If they take it, and choose to take it all, then the system must be able to afford that since that's what's been rationed out. It really just boils down to natural resources. If every one of a billion people wants a car, the only real question is how much metal or other materials exist. If there's enough, then you can allot one car to each person. It kind of really is that simple at the end of the day, and the current way to discuss this is with the term "sustainable." Right now we don't think of sustainable in terms of metals so much (with exceptions in certain rare metals), but we definitely do in terms of energy sources and food sources.
Even if you just limit it to the "government" doing it "for our own good"? Why would someone accept the currency in trade when they know that by the time they go to spend it'll be deflated from other cash hand outs going to people who "need" it?
Now that you mention it, I think a deflationary currency is absolutely the way to go. Accumulating capital should absolutely not be a thing, and especially not leveraging capital to make more capital in a snowball effect. I think the average person already recognizes how odious this is, just as more or less everyone historically has ("usury"). How to manage the system so that this doesn't happen is a very big issue, because you don't want to every end up with de facto slavery where someone has managed to collect the lion's share of Monopoly money and "win" the game. Did you know that Monopoly's game design was actually intended to be a criticism of capitalism's inevitable destination? Oh the irony.