From: tsoon (tsoon@mail.usyd.edu.au)
Date: Tue Oct 27 1998 - 06:05:21 MST
Damien wrote
>favour some kind of anarcho-socialist polity, for want of a better term, in
>which a guaranteed minimum income is provided, without strings, to all
>citizens.
I'm intrigued by your comments here and I hope I'm not straying too far from
Extropian talk. Are you sceptical of the sort of free market
minarchist/anarchist arguments which many on this post (including myself)
hold because of your concerns about a lack of minimal entitlement for
individual flourishing or welfare rights in such systems or does the
mistrust of market-sceptics on this list go deeper than that?
Because if it is the first issue which is the problem then it should be
pointed out I don't think being a libertarian minarchist necessarily rules
out welfare rights even on a Lockean intepretation.
To allay your concerns I suggest you visit 'Geolibertarian' sites and the
Banneker Centre for Economic Justice. These are sites maintained by
libertarians who also find Henry George persuasive.
The basic idea is that there should be a minimal entitlement to welfare
(whether this is best provided on the local level or a global level is more
of practical issue and therefore lends itself to anarchist variations) based
on the common ownership of unappropriated natural resources and entitlement
to compensation for violation of living space through such things as
pollution- your guaranteed minimum income can therefore be funded by green
taxes and land taxes- dispersing the proceeds of these among the population
is therefore not a form of redistribution which would violate libertarian
Lockean rights but merely exercising right to be compensated for loss of
commons (these plus the normal libertarian rights are compossable).
To boot, green taxes are efficient anyway since they are a tax on negative
externalities and taxes on unimproved land values encourage productive use.
That's the theory simplistically put anyway. I'm not a convert but I think
these arguments are worth being taken seriously by libertarians.
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