From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Mon Aug 23 1999 - 16:33:36 MDT
> Most people would call me socialist for bringing this up but I think
> it is both socialist and capitalist.
> The idea is:
> Free Medical & Dental
> Free Education
> Free Housing
> Anything else you want you can buy.
>
> The idea is by helping your neighbor you increase your own chance for
> survival. Anyone for this? Against It? Any ideas on how it would work?
Before this devolves into a thread about the "basics" of libertarian
and capitalist thought, I recommend that you scan the Extropian reading
list for its political works, especially Friedman's "Machinery of
Freedom". Mt. Friedman's web site <http://www.best.com/%7Eddfr/>
also has a lot of good material on it.
Capitalism recognizes quite clearly that "helping your neighbor
increases your own chance for survival"; indeed, because doing so
is rational, it is not necessary for a government to mandate it
by force--people will help their neighbors, friends, families, and
even strangers anyway because they derive benefit from doing so.
Indeed it is not at all unlikely that a libertarian community
would provide some minimal level of assistance in the above areas
as a human capital investment, or merely to keep the
underprivileged from becoming a burden in other ways (crime, etc.)
It would not, of course, /control/ those areas as our system does
to a degree, because that would abridge the rights of free
individuals to determine their own desire for housing, medicine,
education, or other services and pay for whatever level of service
they want.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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