From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Feb 18 2001 - 19:25:48 MST
At 07:04 PM 18/02/01 EST, Greg Burch wrote:
>> 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'*
>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.
In a sense, but, pre-nanotech, the notion is that the GI would be marginal,
just enough to scrape by on. The incentive to earn more will remain
unchanged; only the soul-destroying scrounging for bare necessities will be
absent. This approach is intended to *obliterate* the current mess of
social security payouts that can be tweaked to pay a mother more for
producing an extra `welfare child' than that child costs to support. Of
course, people with brains ruined or addled by major narcotics and accidie
might not be able to make these decisions, and might therefore just keep
getting pregnant anyway. But doesn't this happen anyway to the benighted in
any First World community without death squads or armed contraception police?
Besides, I still think the demographic transition dynamic will tend to kick
in once people understand that their babies are far more likely to live
than die.
Try it and see.
Damien Broderick
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