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Canadian tax payers. I think the article mentioned an increase in taxes (or a cut in spending from somewhere else) would have to fund it.

nerfhammer 16y ago
In theory it could ultimately turn out to be profitable for tax revenue: 1) increased economic activity means increased taxable income from others; depends on the velocity of the money spent via the new income 2) if people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps via this sort of program that means more taxable income for the recipients later in their lives. Impossible to know how it would turn out in advance but interesting to consider.
- maxharris 16y ago
  I disagree. When governments step out of their proper role of protecting individual rights, economic output will necessarily be lower than what it could have been. This is because governments deal in force (and they must do so - they have a proper monopoly on the retaliatory use of it!) But force applied in a non-retaliatory manner inhibits minds - minds from which all economic activity stems.
  - waterside81 16y ago
    I'm intrigued but confused. You're saying if the Canadian govt. guaranteed everybody an annual income of 20K it's an example of "the government not protecting individual rights"?
    - maxharris 16y ago
      "A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) The concept of a “right” pertains only to action-specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men. Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights." Source: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html
      - ewjordan 16y ago
        Your entire chain of argument sounds religious in nature, and at no point did it touch at all on why anything having to do with rights would affect economic output in any way. You've neither pointed out a specific flaw in nerfhammer's argument, nor answered waterside81's question for clarification. All you're doing is reminding us that hard core libertarians hate almost everything that government does, and that they all consider most things that governments try to do to be bad for the economy. You can't successfully argue that a particular action is bad by falling back on the base libertarian dogma that all actions of that sort are bad, or at least you can't do it without offering at least some independent support for the base dogma. We already know that you believe it; what we're asking is why we should believe it in the context of this individual example. There are dozens of possible responses you could give, I've come up with several myself, but frankly, I can come up with many arguments for both sides of the issue, so I'm of the mind that it's likely something we'd need to see a bit of empirical data on to be sure. One of the few things I know for sure about econ is that first-principle-based arguments tend to be complete and utter trash whenever they measure up against real world tests.
        maxharris 16y ago
        > Your entire chain of argument sounds religious in nature, It's not. You make the mistake of equating or asssociating morality with religion. I'm an atheist, and I think that ethics is a science. Applying the same metaphysical and epistemological foundations that give rise to science to ethics (and politics and art by extension) is what I'm advocating. > and at no point did it touch at all on why anything having to do with rights would affect economic output in any way. Yes, and this was intentional. The principle that underlies individual rights is not that it gives rise to increased economic output! (Although it does, this is not essential.) There are plenty of voices out there that will tell you all about the economics of capitalism (AEI, Cato, etc.) But that can't work because economics is not a fundamental field because any economic statement, no matter how trivial, subsumes a great number of concepts. Altruism (a pernicious legacy of Christianity, and before that, ancient Egypt) dominates ethics in the West. It is an awful, irrational and anti-life doctrine, but it will trump economics every time, because ethics is more fundamental in an individual's life than economics is. The only proper way to deal with altruism is to name it, and fight it on principle. You can't do that by talking primarily about economics.
  - JabavuAdams 16y ago
    This is incoherent. Regarding inhibiting minds: when you're not always afraid that you're going to lose your job and your benefits, you can be more creative. Entrepreneurs are almost by definition people who don't care about losing their jobs and benefits (often irrationally).
    - maxharris 16y ago
      Force, as I mean it, is something that other people do to you, in a political context. You can't be politically forced by hunger. To illustrate, imagine that a plane crash leaves you alone, stranded on a remote mountainside. After a couple of weeks, you begin to starve. Clearly, your hunger is not the result of anything but your natural circumstances, and it has nothing to do with politics. So you can't conflate natural phenomena with force in a political context. I say that living is an individual responsibility. To meeting the physical requirements for continued survival is something that each of us must either do for and by ourselves, or, by extension, with voluntary trade with others. If someone doesn't want what you make, it's not political force, even if you're starving. If the interaction is totally voluntary, you'll find people that want what you make, or you'll grow intellectually, and figure out how to make what people want so that you get what you need. Everybody lives! If someone initiates force against you, they're preventing you from thinking about whatever it is they're forcing you about. A gun held against my head will prevent me from thinking about my life, or my future - I can tell you that I wouldn't be thinking about my upcoming physics exam in such an event! A regulatory body that prevents a patient from getting an experimental cancer drug prevents the physician from that loop of thought, trial and observation that in some instances would save real lives (unfortunately, this is not a made-up example.) You can argue about the degree to which this happens in any individual case, but the principle is the same: to think in a way that's useful for advancing your life, you need to think about, and then act on reality. But if someone or some group of people initiate force against you, they are preventing you from doing that, to some very small, or very great extent. No matter the magnitude, it's bad for your existence, which is conditional (you depend on your faculty of apprehending reality and acting upon it for your continued survival.)
      - JabavuAdams 16y ago

nerfhammer 16y ago

In theory it could ultimately turn out to be profitable for tax revenue: 1) increased economic activity means increased taxable income from others; depends on the velocity of the money spent via the new income 2) if people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps via this sort of program that means more taxable income for the recipients later in their lives. Impossible to know how it would turn out in advance but interesting to consider.

maxharris 16y ago
I disagree. When governments step out of their proper role of protecting individual rights, economic output will necessarily be lower than what it could have been. This is because governments deal in force (and they must do so - they have a proper monopoly on the retaliatory use of it!) But force applied in a non-retaliatory manner inhibits minds - minds from which all economic activity stems.
- waterside81 16y ago
  I'm intrigued but confused. You're saying if the Canadian govt. guaranteed everybody an annual income of 20K it's an example of "the government not protecting individual rights"?
  - maxharris 16y ago
    "A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) The concept of a “right” pertains only to action-specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men. Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights." Source: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html
    - ewjordan 16y ago
      Your entire chain of argument sounds religious in nature, and at no point did it touch at all on why anything having to do with rights would affect economic output in any way. You've neither pointed out a specific flaw in nerfhammer's argument, nor answered waterside81's question for clarification. All you're doing is reminding us that hard core libertarians hate almost everything that government does, and that they all consider most things that governments try to do to be bad for the economy. You can't successfully argue that a particular action is bad by falling back on the base libertarian dogma that all actions of that sort are bad, or at least you can't do it without offering at least some independent support for the base dogma. We already know that you believe it; what we're asking is why we should believe it in the context of this individual example. There are dozens of possible responses you could give, I've come up with several myself, but frankly, I can come up with many arguments for both sides of the issue, so I'm of the mind that it's likely something we'd need to see a bit of empirical data on to be sure. One of the few things I know for sure about econ is that first-principle-based arguments tend to be complete and utter trash whenever they measure up against real world tests.
      - maxharris 16y ago
        > Your entire chain of argument sounds religious in nature, It's not. You make the mistake of equating or asssociating morality with religion. I'm an atheist, and I think that ethics is a science. Applying the same metaphysical and epistemological foundations that give rise to science to ethics (and politics and art by extension) is what I'm advocating. > and at no point did it touch at all on why anything having to do with rights would affect economic output in any way. Yes, and this was intentional. The principle that underlies individual rights is not that it gives rise to increased economic output! (Although it does, this is not essential.) There are plenty of voices out there that will tell you all about the economics of capitalism (AEI, Cato, etc.) But that can't work because economics is not a fundamental field because any economic statement, no matter how trivial, subsumes a great number of concepts. Altruism (a pernicious legacy of Christianity, and before that, ancient Egypt) dominates ethics in the West. It is an awful, irrational and anti-life doctrine, but it will trump economics every time, because ethics is more fundamental in an individual's life than economics is. The only proper way to deal with altruism is to name it, and fight it on principle. You can't do that by talking primarily about economics.
- JabavuAdams 16y ago
  This is incoherent. Regarding inhibiting minds: when you're not always afraid that you're going to lose your job and your benefits, you can be more creative. Entrepreneurs are almost by definition people who don't care about losing their jobs and benefits (often irrationally).
  - maxharris 16y ago
    Force, as I mean it, is something that other people do to you, in a political context. You can't be politically forced by hunger. To illustrate, imagine that a plane crash leaves you alone, stranded on a remote mountainside. After a couple of weeks, you begin to starve. Clearly, your hunger is not the result of anything but your natural circumstances, and it has nothing to do with politics. So you can't conflate natural phenomena with force in a political context. I say that living is an individual responsibility. To meeting the physical requirements for continued survival is something that each of us must either do for and by ourselves, or, by extension, with voluntary trade with others. If someone doesn't want what you make, it's not political force, even if you're starving. If the interaction is totally voluntary, you'll find people that want what you make, or you'll grow intellectually, and figure out how to make what people want so that you get what you need. Everybody lives! If someone initiates force against you, they're preventing you from thinking about whatever it is they're forcing you about. A gun held against my head will prevent me from thinking about my life, or my future - I can tell you that I wouldn't be thinking about my upcoming physics exam in such an event! A regulatory body that prevents a patient from getting an experimental cancer drug prevents the physician from that loop of thought, trial and observation that in some instances would save real lives (unfortunately, this is not a made-up example.) You can argue about the degree to which this happens in any individual case, but the principle is the same: to think in a way that's useful for advancing your life, you need to think about, and then act on reality. But if someone or some group of people initiate force against you, they are preventing you from doing that, to some very small, or very great extent. No matter the magnitude, it's bad for your existence, which is conditional (you depend on your faculty of apprehending reality and acting upon it for your continued survival.)
    - JabavuAdams 16y ago