I'm the only libertarian I know who is provisionally in favor of a universal income. But once you have that, you don't need a minimum wage and in fact you don't want one, because you want to maximize the number of people who can find work. The minimum wage exists to prevent exploitation, but if everybody automatically receives enough to live on, that's no longer a factor.

I'm way crazy liberal, but if everyone had the ability to take care of themselves, and live as they want, well, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. You're right. (But then, I'd want health treatment to be like police/fire. Something everyone needs, and we're better all paying for.)

So, yeah. The military, police, fire, health, roads, public school to about 10th grade, I guess the post office as we need a way to ensure public notices, and provide a baseline life through these means? I'd good with that. That's the only government I need.

Just about any other social institutions can be done by people living on their GMI and aided by donations.

Ignoring the normative reasons why one might oppose this, how would it even work practically?

At the level of most of us, wealth is a claim on consumption. So redistribution of wealth among the middle class does enable redistribution of consumption

At the level of rich people, it isn't - wealth represents the ability to direct productive enterprise (e.g., the ability to tell Facebook to do more photo sharing or invade privacy more). Suppose you were to tax Zuckerberg or Ellison and then redistribute, and now every American owns a couple of shares of Facebook and Oracle. How will this enable you to increase the consumption of the lower classes?

That's enough of an improvement for our standard of living for me.

We need more freedom from the "tyranny of the rich and their whims and fancies" and less toys and consumer products...

Many would say the two go hand in hand, or are ultimately synonymous.

Do you support punitive tariffs on foreign imports?

[1] http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2040142,00....

It'd cause all manner of hell on implementation, because it would completely turn the world economy on its head. Right now we're really dependent on abusing the hell out of cheap labor and countries that don't have a solid regulatory structure. So while we sit here and claim to decent labor and environmental standards we're consuming a ton of goods produced with out them at a cheap cost. But the world is a single, closed system. At some point, this is going to catch up to us.

We could use our consumer power to force an equalization in the global labor market by making a simple declaration: obey our labor and environmental standards -- and let us confirm that you do -- or you don't get to sell your goods to our market. Period. Suddenly, outsourced labor looks a lot less attractive. If you can't abuse the cheap labor and lax environmental laws in other countries, then there's no reason not to put your production in the US.

Of course, this all depends on the fact that the US is one of the top consumer markets in the world, and that companies will do anything to avoid being cut out of it. The window of opportunity in which that's true is closing fast with the rise of China. And may, actually, already be closed. Of course, if you could get multiple high consumption countries together and agree on mutual labor standards to enforce and that any company not fulfilling them would be kept out of any of those countries then it'd have a lot more power.

And of course, there's always the fact that any companies that refused could always be replaced by start-ups.

The change over would be a little rough and chaotic, and it's hard (impossible?) to predict what would actually happen during it. But if we manage to make it through it, the resulting world would have a level playing field for labor and environmental practices. It's difficult to predict the effect it would have on living standards for those of us currently abusing everyone else. Our living standard might drop a bit as the price of goods goes up. But then, if this were linked with the previously mentioned law, a lot of the wealth that's caught up in the top of the economy right now would be forced down. That wealth would create a lot more consumers with money to spend, which means more demand, which means more jobs for everyone. So it could mean everyone's living standards go up -- despite a rise in the cost of labor and therefor goods.

I'd be really interested to see someone model it.

This doesn't follow. Most of the wealth that's "caught up in the top of the economy" is simply the means of production. I.e., Zuckerberg's wealth is mainly 30% of Facebook.

Suppose we redistributed 30% of FB to the lower classes. How will this raise living standards?

Except that the current dynamics of our economy show that this isn't how actual consumers want to use their "consumer power". Rather, U.S. consumers can't seem to get enough of cheap goods from countries with lax labor laws imported by corporations like WalMart that exert market leverage due to their huge purchasing volume. Even manufacturers of high-end goods like iPads outsource their labor to places where labor is cheap, because they understand that very few people would want to spend $1000 on an iPad, even if the extra cost went toward promoting social justice.

So who is the "we" that's going to "force" this? We live in a democracy, and consumers are also voters. These voters may not be thrilled to re-elect politicians who enact laws that increase the prices of consumer goods (or energy, or other commodities that affect the average person's standard of living). And this isn't something abstract that people will think only affects somebody else -- it's something they'll feel every week when they have to spend a much larger percentage of their income on food, clothing and other necessities. (Yes, the price of food will go up under your proposal since it's largely dependent on oil, which comes from many countries that don't have U.S.-style labor and environmental standards.)

Rather than unilaterally barring goods from entering the US which do not comply with our labor and environmental laws, a better approach could be to work within the WTO framework to establish common labor and environmental standards.

Of course, this is strongly resisted by developing nations who justifiably see the strict pollution controls as a way to prevent their transition from vassal states to competitive members of the global economy (see: Carbon Taxes).

This case illustrates two points, first, targeting companies or industries rather than their host nations is irrelevant from the perspective of the WTO. Second, the WTO has some very powerful tools for forcing member nations into compliance with its rulings.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21i...

That wouldn't work that well. Companies would just split along payment levels, then. I.e. either outsource the peons, or take the CEO on loan from McKinsey.

What isn't usually mentioned in discussions like this are the resulting lack of returns on investment on behalf of future retirees, but to be honest, I can't imagine why anyone would rationally expect an economy to be stable enough that they could plan not to work for 40+ years of their life - looking around the world, this delusion is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon; there are other valid models.

Well, that or massive shortages and black market sublets. I agree that housing is way too expensive, but before coming up with new ways to solve it with central planning, how about fixing the central planning that's a primary cause of the problem (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4032046).

Don't let the status quo put you off of a good thing.