Posted on 05/30/2014 2:55:23 PM PDT by bamahead
It’s sad, but the current approach of usually taking “tainted” property even where the participants either walk or get slaps on the wrist, makes for what most drug dealers view as a tax.
It’s a situation where old, moldy band-aids are being slapped on a cancer.
How about that we now have a society and institutions that will help you and maintain you well beyond nature’s tolerance for dumb behavior?
Not a particular fan of that, but we might as well recognize the fact that we have, and will continue to have a safety net that by its very existence encourages risky behavior.
The alternative is to allow those who screw up badly enough to quite literally die in the street. However much I think that is in the best longterm interests of society, I recognize that it isn’t going to happen. So what’s the point of discussing it as it it’s a viable policy option?
Private charity is a viable policy option. Public charity has failed and it might be time to try an option that uses some free market concepts. For instance, you could create a voucher that allowed the participant to choose among a series of policy initiatives that all cost the same amount. One might be a job training program run by a church that demands certain behavioral norms, another a similar program that doesn’t demand any change in behavior/attitude. Run the outcomes and use the one with the best track record of getting people up and on their own.
Private charity might be a viable policy option in theory.
It is not, however, politically viable. So while it might be fun to sit around and speculate about such options, the only way to implement them would be to overthrow the Constitution, the problem of course being that libertarians are probably the worst people in the world to stage a revolution and impose their will on everybody else.
Or of course a long-term educational effort could in theory develop a libertarian majority. But since the present argument is over how fast to expand the welfare state, I wouldn’t suggest holding my breath.
There is yet another problem, one that is almost never addressed by anybody, libertarians or statists.
Technology is in the process of making humans economically obsolete. This started at the left end of the IQ scale and is working itself to the right, at IMO something like one IQ point every couple of years. The rate is increasing, I think.
In a libertarian society, how do those with no real economic demand for the services they are capable of providing survive? I would love to see libertarian solutions to technological obsolescence of people, but haven’t yet. The “solution” appears, IMO, to guarantee the expansion of the State. I don’t like it, but that’s what I expect.
Inner city parents when given the chance jump at school vouchers. I don’t think an idea like “self improvement vouchers” would be ignored. The goal is to sift the urban vote. In most states, even ones considered blue, a reduction in the urban Democrat vote by 5-20% would turn statewide offices over to the GOP.
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