Re: pension (was: Re: Amusing anti-cloning arguments)

tsoon (tsoon@mail.usyd.edu.au)
Wed, 28 Oct 1998 00:05:21 +1100

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.