I think where I differ from the Classical Liberal is that I would support a "welfare state", but in the form of a Basic Income or Reverse Income Tax rather than

I think where I differ from the Classical Liberal is that I would support a "welfare state", but in the form of a Basic Income or Reverse Income Tax rather than anything being subsidized. I believe that by providing a living wage by default would eliminate a lot of the authority that corporations would have over the lowest-paid employees. The wait staff and fry cooks and janitors would be much less tolerant of abusive working conditions if they didn't fear for missing that income. Additionally, I suspect it would allow the many middle managers and aggressive marketers to pursue other interests, like music or art, and leave the rest of us alone to do our jobs. I don't care if they stay home and smoke pot and play video games all day, as long as they stay out of the way. I'm just not sure how to avoid the feedback loop, since now labor will cost so much more, so everything will cost more, so the cost of living goes up, so we have to increase the amount of basic income to compensate. I also don't know how to prevent things like, for example, slumlords setting the cost of rent to exactly 40% of the BI amount, or whatever the maximum allowed would be. It seems to me that BI can't merely be a supplement, or even set to "Poverty Level", it has to be something larger, and basically put all businesses that target the poor out of business.