Why you can't be anything you want to be

Re:Why you can't be anything you want to be by _delirium on Thursday August 16, 2012 @03:30PM (#4393206)

I think of it as more closely associated with libertarians than Marxists, though I assume American libertarians have since disowned it. Its most prominent 20th-century advocates were Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who viewed it as the most economically efficient way to add a basic safety net to an otherwise un-meddled-with market economy. Marxists generally want a more fundamental change in the economy, not a Hayekian economy, not even a Western-Europe-style social market economy (it would be a surprise to Scandinavians, for example, to find out that they were on the USSR side of the Cold War!).

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Re:Why you can't be anything you want to be by crusso on Thursday August 16, 2012 @04:34PM (#4393515)

Basic Income isn't Libertarian at all.

Friedman wasn't a Basic Income proponent. He was a proponent of negative taxation. He was only interested in being consistent with the way we treat income tax and welfare. He felt that the welfare manager's job of determining exactly how to administer relief to recipients was something that couldn't be done properly. He preferred just giving cash based upon income levels on a sliding scale.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

Given the abuse of the Welfare system over the half century since Friedman supported negative taxation, I don't doubt that he would have different views and controls for such a system were he alive today.

A lot of ideas sounded good 50 or 100 years ago that we have tried but have failed. It doesn't mean we should keep trying them.

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Re:Why you can't be anything you want to be by widerquist on Friday August 17, 2012 @11:22AM (#4396794)

You're mistaken about Friedman not being for Basic Income. In an interview only 12 years ago, Friedman was asked about basic income as an "alternative" to the negative income tax, and Friedman replied that both were the same thing. Friedman wrote, "A basic or citizen's income is not an alternative to a negative income tax. It is simply another way to introduce a negative income tax if it is accompanied with a positive income tax with no exemption. A basic income of a thousand units with a 20 percent rate on earned income is equivalent to a negative income tax with an exemption of five thousand units and a 20 percent rate below and above five thousand units."

The entire interview is online at:

http://www.usbig.net/newsletters/june.html

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