It Is Free Market With Many Incentives
A common misinterpretation, as many have said, is that the 'blank check, check card' system has no incentive and is Communism. Communism is where the government tells you what to produce, how much to produce, for whom to produce, and how to produce. Furthermore, Communism uses currency, which is the present, conventional rationing system. Also, Communism has all resources and products go to the government and distributed by the government. The system doesn’t do any of these. It is free market, as envisioned.
Some say that there is no incentive to work because they are not given money or paid. But they are. The same argument can be said of children going to school. There are no incentives for children to do any schoolwork. They are not paid. They will still have food, clothing, comfortable shelter, hygiene needs, and a place to sleep. Children will not be deprived of these basic needs. So, children have no incentives to do anything in school and schoolwork or attend school.
Working will entitle one to food, clothing, comfortably cooled and heated shelter, a place to sleep, and hygiene needs. Workers are entitled, with few exceptions, to 'acquire' (word used instead of the word 'buying') products that they want, desire and enjoy. There could be other incentives. Incentives could be job satisfaction, power, control, amenities, special services, special benefits, perks, environment, facilities, special items for personal use, and anything else the workplace can provide that is motivating and pleasing to workers like airplanes, cars, boats, mansions, vacation houses, etc. Notice the word, ‘workers’.
With very few exceptions, non-workers would steal and rob the economy of production and provide no bartered productive benefit. Non-workers will not be entitled to food, clothing, comfortable shelter, hygiene needs, and a place to sleep. Acquiring these provisions is theft, and charity should be a serious crime. Charity is criminal with this 'blank check, check card' system. The system needs to be intolerant and brutal to provide serious consequences for inactivity. Non-workers will have to rely on dwindling savings of money. Workers will have a choice: prosperity, or deprivation and destitution.
These should be adequate incentives.
Everything costs something - muscle, love, pain, ideas, life itself. There are no freebies. The employment of human resources and other resources are the costs. The cost is called in economics, ‘opportunity cost’. This means that resources, including time, machines, and people, etc., are unable to do different things, with the same resources, at the same time. Workers engaged in production of one product, that consumers want or need, can't produce others. There’s a limit of employing resources, called the production possibilities curve (PPC), which is what is maximum possible production at this moment. In the US, right now, there are 84 million people can work and aren’t. So there’s tremendous slack in US economy and even more so in smaller countries with unemployment and joblessness of 40% to 90%. As the ‘slack’ is employed, the PPC would grow and so would prosperity.
To address the Communism question again, the system is market based. Entrepreneurs will see an opportunity, form a plan, acquire resources, and operate for a market need. And the big plus is that, without monetary cost, there is no penalty or ruin for failure. The only ‘control’ is an adequate the business plan; that the machines, supplies, people, and all else needed must be planned to be productively employed and have a guide of how the business operates. Resources must have a clear beneficial purpose, since it’d be in very short supply.
I'm a Republican-friendly Libertarian and am a firm believer in free markets.