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Hey nerds. Use some lube when you circlejerk so hard that an-cap=libertarian, it'll keep your parts from getting ripped off.Serrath posted:I assumed this would be the answer... disability rights and social safety nets for people unable to care for themselves is one of my particular interests (full disclosure, I'm a psychologist and working with disadvantaged groups is virtually 100% of my practice) so I guess I'm looking for specifics. Like, I get that the free market will step in and MAGIC but I'm interested to know if any libertarian thinkers have really taken the effort to articulate clearly how they imagine the most vulnerable populations will be cared for in their utopia... even if unrealistic, I'm curious to know what mechanics they'd generate (short of allowing the disabled to die in the street, of course). For a serious answer to your post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM F.A. Hayek posted:The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:49
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Helsing posted:I'm sorry if your dumb philosophy got co-opted by somebody dumber. Really it seems like fair play given that libertarianism was a term that American right wingers appropriated from the anarchist left a few decades ago. Complaining about it makes you sound like one of those Trotskyists who claims that literally anyone outside their five person group isn't a "real socialist". Meh, negative income isn't required to be a libertarian (obviously) but since it really is the least expensive/micromanaging thing I think it's a hypocrisy in American libertarianism. Maybe it's an idea that'll have a chance in the future.  Of course in the meantime we got to replace redlining with DeusExMachinima fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Aug 14, 2014 |
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Aug 14, 2014 04:05
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Serrath posted:I do appreciate the direct answer to my question... is this all? To elaborate, does the libertarian answer to the cost of living associated with disability begin and end with a guaranteed wage floor? Thanks for the reply. I'll freely admit that if you were to keep one welfare program in the brave new negative tax world, it should be Medicare/Medicaid but that's also a relatively smaller program ($700b versus the entire federal welfare/social security budget at around $2.3 trillion). The U.S. prints more than that amount of money a year and so there's no reason why it should have to be funded by  taxation through theft at which point I have no objection at all. Currently that printed money is just being handed straight to big private banks in the country, presumably with the purpose of stimulating the economy. Of course, people in need spending money at the doctor's office would also stimulate the economy so it's just a thin excuse for corporate welfare. Even in Milton Friedman's world, when you have a central reserve he believed you should print money every year to counter deflation (through population growth, if nothing else) and provide a stable safe place for value. That printed money has to be given to someone, so by all means if we've got a little bit of post-scarcity kicking, give it to those who need it most. It neither harms me nor picks my pocket. I don't have a problem with governments having a currency of their own. Not even Ron Paul does, although some libertarians certainly do. Currently we're printing about $1T a year, so it's not a tall order to cut down on printing and still fund Medicaid this way. I'd like you to address the majority of people who would benefit more from having more cash to spend. Do you think the current welfare system in Australia and the U.S. can do it better? If mostly white guys administering life for mostly black guys is a good idea, why has poverty persisted since America's Great Society in the 60's whereas the cash-based social security of the 30's vastly reduced senior homelessness? If you take Friedman's negative tax number in that video as a guide, $3,000 in 1964 translates to about $20,300 today in America. IIRC that's like $1k/yr below the federal poverty line for one person with three dependents, and about $9,000-10,000 higher than poverty line for someone without dependents. For the sake of making a quick point with a laughably broad brush, take that $2.3 trillion welfare budget number from above. I think roughly 14% of Americans live at or below poverty line. 320M x .14 = 44.8M. Split that $2.3T budget between them evenly and you get around $51,000 per year per person. That's straight middle class, and yet there's still 40+ million in literal poverty. Why aren't we getting bang for our buck? Helsing posted:People across the political spectrum support a minimum income or negative income tax of some kind. I don't think its in any way a distinguishing feature of libertarianism, especially given that many libertarians would be completely against it. By no means am I saying it's an idea only libertarians have. In the sense of libertarianism as an adjective, it is an idea that is comparatively more libertarian than what we currently have in America. For a general sum, I'm not an expert. $20,000 a year x 44.8M poors is $896B/year. A less than a trillion a year budget sounds pretty cost efficient, especially when mostly poverty and desperation motivated crime cost us over that amount every year. We could scale it so that you would make no less than $35,000 a year if you had a full-time job paying min wage, $15k + $20k. Make more than that and the taxpayer contributes less, but you're still at the minimum floor of $35k through job wages + tax rebate. People will still be proud (and/or petty) of having a higher wage than someone else so I don't buy the idea that it'll destroy incentive to work. Employees will be freer to pursue their own business ideas or trash an abusive boss and walk away, something that civil rights legislation has never accomplished. Explain why social security was so successful at vastly reducing senior poverty in the 30's. You get a check, and that's the end of Uncle Sam's involvement. He doesn't need to micromanage you after that point. And it worked. I'm not going to go into the idea that you're denying someone agency in their life with how rules-heavy these programs are today, because it seems like you may not share that concern in the way I do. But understand that does greatly inform my disapproval of these programs versus no-strings cash.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:06
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Nelson Mandingo posted:What a thread to miss. Serious answer from my Milton Friedman worship: if you're too uninvolved politically to fight for your negative taxation--I mean we're talking pure free cash here--then nothing can save you in any hypothetical system. If you do have the guarantee of living without starving, then you can always go your own way even if someone else has terrible taste/ethics. Unless you're also so uninvolved that you let this individual subvert your 14th Amendment rights, etc., in which case you've got  BIG GOVERNMENT. Different flavors of libertarians may disagree with me on that last sentence.Basically, you can't save someone who wouldn't save themselves given the chance and power to do so.
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Aug 19, 2014 20:56
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