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> In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society. Another Marxist philosopher,

> In effect Paine advocates for a guaranteed minimum income, way back in 1795. That, to him, restored justice to agrarian society. Another Marxist philosopher, eh? Forced contribution backed up by violence of the state doesn't sound like justice to me, and is fundamentally incompatible with the liberty envisioned by America's founding fathers. If only we'd listen to them, we'd all be better off. Edit: my delivery is either a bit too deadpan, or HN readers have encountered enough would-be libertarians who are completely unaware that Paine is arguably a founding father and Marx wasn't borne until 1818 that my attempt at satire has already been beaten by reality. I'll hope it's the former.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
simonsarris 14y ago
Oh bull. Failure to pay taxes due is theft from the rest of society. And don't claim any ownership of founding fathers in your ideology - Old Ben Franklin has been sticking it to "all taxation is theft" Libertarians since 1783, in absolute and direct contradiction of your sentiment: > "The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law. > "All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."
- nahname 14y ago
  That second quote is very interesting to read. Do you have the source for it?
  - dhugiaskmak 14y ago
    http://books.google.com/books?id=45EEAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA171&ots=r65qvT4ilB&dq=All%20Property%2C%20indeed%2C%20except%20the%20Savages%20temporary%20Cabin&pg=PA171#v=onepage&q=All%20Property,%20indeed,%20except%20the%20Savages%20temporary%20Cabin&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=45EEAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA171&...
saraid216 14y ago
I can't tell if you're serious or not...
ejp 14y ago
Does Thomas Paine himself not qualify as a 'founding father'? "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” --John Adams [1] Whenever I see arguments rooted in the founder's intent, I always wonder exactly which founding fathers the arguer will choose. In truth the people who might qualify as 'founding fathers' had a wide variety of political opinions. Perhaps the only unifying trait was that they were able to compromise to get things done. I'm hoping your comment was purposeful hyperbole... [1]: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books (via Wikipedia)
DannoHung 14y ago
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say I think your sarcasm matrix is miscalibrated. You need to add a little more bite to the snark to make this batch correct.
obstacle1 14y ago
I hope you're joking, I really can't tell. In case you're not, Marx wasn't even born until 1818. Marxism as an ideology wasn't really a thing until at least the very late 19th century. Thomas Paine was most definitely not a Marxist philosopher.
invalidOrTaken 14y ago
I agree. We must take into account, however, that changing zeitgeists often make it more difficult to go it alone; legally, its probably harder to be a subsistence farmer today than it was in 1750. Perhaps you want to grow some corn and sell the rest; but perhaps it is now required that all corn sold meet some minimum standard, requiring a certain fertilizer only sold in 1000-acre doses. This is fine for the agribusinesses that corn farms had become by the time the standards were set, but not so great for the guy who decides to become a small-time farmer 200 years too late. So I agree that the state mandating your charity is a bad thing, but the yearning for freedom from such must be coupled with an alternative. Small solar, small-garden farming techniques: we figure these out, and no one will be mad at the computer guys for automating their backyard garden.
scarmig 14y ago
Perfectly hit the sweet spot. 9/10.
steveklabnik 14y ago
It's not so much that you're too deadpan, it's just that it's Poe's Law for anything Marx related around here.
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Unfortunately, you invoked Poe's Law: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of ~~Fundamentalism~~ Proprietarianism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.
skyraider 14y ago
Milton Friedman also advocated a universal minimum income. The thing is, he advocates a minimum income, not a minimum set of social services. There's a huge difference in the economics between goods or services that are (ideally) competitively purchased on an open market and good and services that are delivered by a monopoly (whether the monopoly is in the market or is government itself) or monopsony (in the case of some govn't welfare programs, which can be thought of as single entities that negotiate pricing for arrays of goods and services). A hybrid between Milton Friedman-style minimum income and more socialist notions of welfare is something like the US food stamps program, where you have to spend the money on food-related goods, but where you can shop at a larger set of providers and still deliver the benefits of competitive purchasing to the food market.
- nitrogen 14y ago
  I think you'd need a combination of both minimum income and minimum services that goes beyond your food stamps example to be successful. If you only have a minimum income, then monopoly/oligopoly providers will raise their prices to absorb the entire minimum income. This is already happening in the form of healthcare prices rising significantly faster than inflation.
  - skyraider 14y ago
    You're quite correct about them raising their prices, but then again, healthcare is competitively purchased only the loosest and least meaningful way. There really aren't strong competitive forces emanating from the demand side - it's more like a demand-side oligopoly of buyers setting prices. In healthcare, we are arguably seeing the expected outcome of a lack of meaningful price competition. The government could take action to enable competitive individual purchasing of care instead of monopsony or group buying. It could provide cash incentives for people who shop around for basic, easy-to-understand care. It could fund patient education for more complex care. And if this model proves successful, it could be expanded to harder-to-understand care gradually and with caution to see how consumers react. In other words, competition can only work if it's allowed to. Today, food prices are raised for various reasons, but I am not aware of a school of economics that faults this on a demand-side government-funded competitive individual purchasing program (not that you said that either).
snake_plissken 14y ago
lolo Marx railed against the commodification of labor and the implications of making it a commodity (one of which happened to be how a wage was no longer just a worker's time put into something he could just 'do')

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

simonsarris 14y ago

Oh bull. Failure to pay taxes due is theft from the rest of society. And don't claim any ownership of founding fathers in your ideology - Old Ben Franklin has been sticking it to "all taxation is theft" Libertarians since 1783, in absolute and direct contradiction of your sentiment: > "The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law. > "All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it."

nahname 14y ago
That second quote is very interesting to read. Do you have the source for it?
- dhugiaskmak 14y ago
  http://books.google.com/books?id=45EEAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA171&ots=r65qvT4ilB&dq=All%20Property%2C%20indeed%2C%20except%20the%20Savages%20temporary%20Cabin&pg=PA171#v=onepage&q=All%20Property,%20indeed,%20except%20the%20Savages%20temporary%20Cabin&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=45EEAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA171&...

saraid216 14y ago

I can't tell if you're serious or not...

ejp 14y ago

Does Thomas Paine himself not qualify as a 'founding father'? "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” --John Adams [1] Whenever I see arguments rooted in the founder's intent, I always wonder exactly which founding fathers the arguer will choose. In truth the people who might qualify as 'founding fathers' had a wide variety of political opinions. Perhaps the only unifying trait was that they were able to compromise to get things done. I'm hoping your comment was purposeful hyperbole... [1]: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books (via Wikipedia)

DannoHung 14y ago

I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say I think your sarcasm matrix is miscalibrated. You need to add a little more bite to the snark to make this batch correct.

obstacle1 14y ago

I hope you're joking, I really can't tell. In case you're not, Marx wasn't even born until 1818. Marxism as an ideology wasn't really a thing until at least the very late 19th century. Thomas Paine was most definitely not a Marxist philosopher.

invalidOrTaken 14y ago

I agree. We must take into account, however, that changing zeitgeists often make it more difficult to go it alone; legally, its probably harder to be a subsistence farmer today than it was in 1750. Perhaps you want to grow some corn and sell the rest; but perhaps it is now required that all corn sold meet some minimum standard, requiring a certain fertilizer only sold in 1000-acre doses. This is fine for the agribusinesses that corn farms had become by the time the standards were set, but not so great for the guy who decides to become a small-time farmer 200 years too late. So I agree that the state mandating your charity is a bad thing, but the yearning for freedom from such must be coupled with an alternative. Small solar, small-garden farming techniques: we figure these out, and no one will be mad at the computer guys for automating their backyard garden.

scarmig 14y ago

Perfectly hit the sweet spot. 9/10.

steveklabnik 14y ago

It's not so much that you're too deadpan, it's just that it's Poe's Law for anything Marx related around here.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Unfortunately, you invoked Poe's Law: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of ~~Fundamentalism~~ Proprietarianism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

skyraider 14y ago

Milton Friedman also advocated a universal minimum income. The thing is, he advocates a minimum income, not a minimum set of social services. There's a huge difference in the economics between goods or services that are (ideally) competitively purchased on an open market and good and services that are delivered by a monopoly (whether the monopoly is in the market or is government itself) or monopsony (in the case of some govn't welfare programs, which can be thought of as single entities that negotiate pricing for arrays of goods and services). A hybrid between Milton Friedman-style minimum income and more socialist notions of welfare is something like the US food stamps program, where you have to spend the money on food-related goods, but where you can shop at a larger set of providers and still deliver the benefits of competitive purchasing to the food market.

nitrogen 14y ago
I think you'd need a combination of both minimum income and minimum services that goes beyond your food stamps example to be successful. If you only have a minimum income, then monopoly/oligopoly providers will raise their prices to absorb the entire minimum income. This is already happening in the form of healthcare prices rising significantly faster than inflation.
- skyraider 14y ago
  You're quite correct about them raising their prices, but then again, healthcare is competitively purchased only the loosest and least meaningful way. There really aren't strong competitive forces emanating from the demand side - it's more like a demand-side oligopoly of buyers setting prices. In healthcare, we are arguably seeing the expected outcome of a lack of meaningful price competition. The government could take action to enable competitive individual purchasing of care instead of monopsony or group buying. It could provide cash incentives for people who shop around for basic, easy-to-understand care. It could fund patient education for more complex care. And if this model proves successful, it could be expanded to harder-to-understand care gradually and with caution to see how consumers react. In other words, competition can only work if it's allowed to. Today, food prices are raised for various reasons, but I am not aware of a school of economics that faults this on a demand-side government-funded competitive individual purchasing program (not that you said that either).

snake_plissken 14y ago

lolo Marx railed against the commodification of labor and the implications of making it a commodity (one of which happened to be how a wage was no longer just a worker's time put into something he could just 'do')