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RE: What would a legitimate basic income buy?
Exactly! This is why I believe the market equilibrium of basic income would leave someone well below the poverty line.
The question of whether or not a Basic Income should be implemented hinges upon each individual's subjective estimation of where the equilibrium point would be. Would 1 share be worth $1 or $50 per day?
In my opinion, implementing a currency system in this manner would be worth doing because it would be close enough to "fixed supply" to get all of the desired benefits of a stable currency, it wouldn't be debt based, and it wouldn't transfer wealth unfairly. In aggregate it would also prevent concentration of wealth. So even if everyone only got $1 per day it would still be worth doing.
We have a real life example of this in Zimbabwe... Productive commercial farms were seized and their owners dispossessed. The land was then given to "war veterans" to appease them and buy their vote for the incumbent geriatric "Bob" Mugabe to continue his "elected dictatorship" and presidency for life.
In a short couple of years Zimbabwe went from Africa's "breadbasket" to the "basket-case" of Africa.
Many now migrate to SA just to stop from starving, I have employed many of them...
University graduates working in farmlands at minimum wage just to have something to send back to their starving families back home... they then send physical cash back home because back home, due to hyperinflation, the local currency totally collapsed.
Zim then switched to the USD but because there are no USD's available citizens resort to trust and IOU's to transact. The rich have splendid bank account balances but can do nothing with it as there is no liquidity to draw out cash.
Now many more people have land, the economy has collapsed and very few have food... one more drought and Zimbabwe becomes Ethiopa... dependent on international food aid, when they have some of the most fertile soil in the world but the newly possessed have no knowledge of how to make it work on anything more than a subsistence level and even that is done poorly.