User blog comment:TheTobarMethod/Gold and Income Overhaul?/@comment-1330314-20130625120244

Aside from having to completely rebalance items and champions around this new income (especially regarding carries/junglers), the main problem with this suggestion is that it'd encourage much less interesting play. By your own admission, the relative benefit of killing a champion decreases while the opportunity cost of trying to land a kill decreases, and so the laning phase would very likely turn into a drawn-out farm-fest.

Aside from this, I don't see any beneficial tradeoffs this system might bring. Equalizing mid-game bruisers and late-game carries isn't a good idea, as carries are meant to be inherently riskier and should thus be more effective if they incur risks and reap the rewards (i.e. by getting more gold, which now everybody would be able to do). You also say this would make high-end items less risky to attain (since you could get them just by farming), which would just make the game boring. You also say that teams on the losing side could equalize by farming a lot, but that itself is incorrect: if a team is doing well, they'd be much more at leisure to farm and zone out the opposition. Since they wouldn't even have to focus on killing champions to get a good income, they could just multiply the power differential in a rather bland manner. Likewise, attacking the enemy team wouldn't reap as much of a reward as farming, and so you wouldn't catch up by that much.