In a message dated 2/10/01 7:41:31 PM Central Standard Time,
d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au writes:
> At 11:16 AM 10/02/01 EST, Greg Burch wrote:
>
> >> I've been looking at the guaranteed income from a new perspective
since
> >> reading Chapter 7 of THE SPIKE.
>
> >I confess it was the part of Damien's book that made me grit my teeth -
but,
> >hey, he's Australian, so you have to cut him some slack :-0
You know, Damien, I was joking . . .
> But this misses the key aspect of Theobald's proposal (and that mad
> socialist Milton Friedman's), which is to *abolish* most of the
> bureaucratic meddling and tinkering by making the income floor a
> *guaranteed `right'*, a secure floor permitting either enterprise or sloth.
> True, most models then propose higher taxes once incomes start to exceed
> that minimum, but this needn't be any more complex or horrid than the way
> things are done now.
All of which is very appealing, I have to admit. I can even squint and
suspend a principled objection to the redistributive nature of the scheme for
the sake of argument. But one issue keeps coming back to subvert this idea
in my mind: So long as people have reproductive freedom, there is no check on
a couple's ability to impose costs on "society at large". There is no
feedback between the decision to have an additional child and cost to the
parents, since those costs are a highly "diluted" externality.
> But where the money going to come from? I'm not going to pay some lazy
> thief to loll around, or suffer my rightful earnings to be extorted from
> me!
Now I think you're poking fun at me . . .
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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