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we already provide the bare minimum...we have welfare, social security, unemployment benefits, hospitals that are required to treat your broken arm even if you

we already provide the bare minimum...we have welfare, social security, unemployment benefits, hospitals that are required to treat your broken arm even if you can't pay for it...all sorts of help from churches and other charitable organizations. i don't think there is any threat of anyone in the united states starving to death unless they are anorexic, addicted to drugs, infested with tape worms and too stubborn to see a doctor, or lost in the woods for a long time. what you're thinking of is a star-trek sort of world. we're a long way off from that. we're still in the jungle baby. just be glad you're alive and breathing and stop trying to convince uncle sam to take even more of my money or i'll just stop working and play call of duty all day and let you program all these websites for me.

_delirium 15y ago
I'm not sure what kind of world you live in, but: 1) the U.S. is quite wealthy overall and can easily afford to maintain a basic minimum standard; and 2) does not currently do so in any sort of effective way. You're correct that we do spend a lot of money piecemeal to get some semblance of a safety net, which is one reason even libertarians like Hayek and Friedman suggest it would be better to just actually provide a direct safety net, in a much less distorting way, instead of this crazy mixture of special-case and bureaucratic safety nets. The main people promoting those seem not to be libertarians but nanny-state conservatives who want to somehow make sure that someone's food stamps are spent on food and not beer. To me, as a more libertarian-leaning sort of person (albeit in teh Hayekian sense), if they're getting $100 in assistance, I don't give a damn what they do with it past that point. Give it in cash, and if they squander it on vodka instead of buying food, well then that's their problem at that point. I don't really believe your threat. Is the only reason you work because you couldn't live a $10k/yr subsistence living otherwise? You're not actually interested in creating things, exchanging value with people, etc.? That's certainly not the case for myself or most people who care about technology; I couldn't imagine sitting around playing call of duty all day, living off ramen in a cheap hovel in a bad neighborhood, if that option were offered to me tomorrow. Taxes certainly aren't much of a deterrent; once you add up all the exclusions and whatever I pay an effective 20% tax rate or so, and I'm not even in one of the lowest tax brackets.

_delirium 15y ago

I'm not sure what kind of world you live in, but: 1) the U.S. is quite wealthy overall and can easily afford to maintain a basic minimum standard; and 2) does not currently do so in any sort of effective way. You're correct that we do spend a lot of money piecemeal to get some semblance of a safety net, which is one reason even libertarians like Hayek and Friedman suggest it would be better to just actually provide a direct safety net, in a much less distorting way, instead of this crazy mixture of special-case and bureaucratic safety nets. The main people promoting those seem not to be libertarians but nanny-state conservatives who want to somehow make sure that someone's food stamps are spent on food and not beer. To me, as a more libertarian-leaning sort of person (albeit in teh Hayekian sense), if they're getting $100 in assistance, I don't give a damn what they do with it past that point. Give it in cash, and if they squander it on vodka instead of buying food, well then that's their problem at that point. I don't really believe your threat. Is the only reason you work because you couldn't live a $10k/yr subsistence living otherwise? You're not actually interested in creating things, exchanging value with people, etc.? That's certainly not the case for myself or most people who care about technology; I couldn't imagine sitting around playing call of duty all day, living off ramen in a cheap hovel in a bad neighborhood, if that option were offered to me tomorrow. Taxes certainly aren't much of a deterrent; once you add up all the exclusions and whatever I pay an effective 20% tax rate or so, and I'm not even in one of the lowest tax brackets.