OK, now that you two have gone over your personal viewpoints, I'll run mine by you. I happen to have a foot in the camp of the libertarians and another in the camp of the pragmatists. A single philosophy taken to extremes can't solve everything but neither can the government. I too agree that the insurmountable slope of starting with nothing is a downside to the pure libertarian system.
For someone who is truly born with major socioeconomic disadvantages, it won't merely be a matter of lacking the option of eating out regularly. Heck, I probably only got to eat out twice a year as a kid. These people will face possibly insurmountable disadvantages such as fetal alcohol syndrome, malnutrition (not necessarily a lack of calories, but an imbalance in nutrients), possibly abusive or absent parents and a lack of good role models. Just talking about this makes me wish they'd invent a way to make infertility the default. Then we could demand that prospective parents demonstrate adequate resources (psychological, financial, emotional, etc.) before turning on their reproductive ability. Unfortunately such technology is a ways down the road. Right now people are born all the time as a result of "accidents."
Now any constitutionalist worth his or her salt will tell you that "created equal" means created equal before the law. It doesn't mean everybody gets to start with the same stuff, genes and chances. In the real world such an idea is absurd. However there certainly is an innate sense of justice in each of us that can become more jaded as we age but resurfaces when discussing what an ideal society should look like.
I am a huge fan of the online book
Manna by Marshall Brain and its depiction of how a capitalist society such as our own becomes destroyed by the end of human labor as the source of production of wealth. I don't doubt one bit that sooner or later we will reach the point where less than 50% of society will perform any labor of any commercial value as a result of improved automation (think autopilots better than humans, robotic semi-trucks and taxis, vending-machine style fast food joints, roombas that can do custodial duties for entire skyscrapers, etc.).
When you put this into the picture it becomes apparent that to have anything like what we consider a just society 100 years from now we had better begin thinking about some kind of
Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) system. One way to achieve this is by a
Negative Income Tax. While it certainly could be effective, the libertarian in me recoils at the thought of so directly taking money from productive members of society.
GMIMy alternative would be to set up an entity entirely separate from the government in charge of the GMI program. The government could provide it with its initial endowment. This could include all of the electromagnetic spectrum (excepting defense and emergency bandwidths) which could be leased to various carriers as an income stream. In addition I would support revising current copyright laws to make ALL copyright expire after a short period of time, say 3 years. If the rights holder wished to continue the privilege of monopoly granted by copyright past this, they would be required to provide perhaps 60% of the revenue earned to the GMI entity. Many other methods of generating revenue for this organization could be devised that would not require it to directly take money out of people's pockets. Ideally the GMI would be the only social program going except those dealing with wards of the court and the mentally ill as well as legacy obligations such as veterans. There would be no need for social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etc.
In Brain's story, the GMI entity was a collective that one joined by purchasing a share but I don't see that method working very well.
Dispersement:We're all aware of the horrible ways people mismanage their money. Particularly that which they did not earn. To partially counter this, I have several stipulations for the method of dispersement of the funds. Each person would have to create an account and register it to receive their funds by something like direct deposit. Rather than depositing a monthly sum, the GMI would trickle funds into each account (similar to the way that gmail boxes expand). However one would have to manually sweep the funds from the GMI account where they were slowly accumulating into one's own personal bank account. If the GMI account had not been swept in 12 months, money deposited a year before would be removed and redistributed into the general fund. Laws would be passed forbidding lenders from loaning money against expected future earnings from the GMI to prevent people from using the windfall to make their situation worse.
I have not yet figured out exactly how to ensure people sign up for adequate health insurance coverage in this system. Hospitals probably wouldn't be subsidizing free emergency room visits since no one would have any excuse to be penniless. Obviously those who were judged incompetent to manage their own finances would need to have guardians appointed them.
Now Don, I want to know what you think about this and if you would support Ron Paul if his libertarianism was tied in with the creation of a sustainable GMI granting entity? Also Nate, could you live with this sytem and what do you think will happen if we don't do something about increasing automation?
LongeCity
