Comment by gortok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gortok | Hacker News Reader

Some libertarians support the Basic Income Guarantee only if our only choice is between our current system and abolishing it for the Basic Income Guarantee.

I can't speak for all libertarianism, but generally speaking libertarians do not support federal government welfare systems, for the following reasons:

- They usurp the role of private welfare, or even local community run welfare, where you know who the money is going to and whether or not they're abusing it

- "Top down" social programs only last as long as you have more producing than non-producing (or in our case, as long as you can borrow money to pay for it). They lead to financial ruin and in the long run will cause disaster for the generation holding the bag.

- They increase the amount of force and coercion; suddenly using welfare as a weapon, the left can increase the size of government, the right can increase the size of the military (I do not differentiate between Veterans welfare from the VA or civilian welfare).

- They take money from those that produce and give it to those that do not

And I haven't even gotten into the economic issues with a basic income guarantee.

You notice that whenever the government gets involved in an industry, those costs immediately go up? The government literally gives away money every year (and even guarantees loans without even asking what your loan is for), and the cost of college keeps rising and rising. This is classic inflation.

What do you think will happen to the cost of goods if we are suddenly printing money simply to give to every last human being on this continent? If you don't expect prices to rise, you haven't been paying attention to either healthcare or education.

Libertarianism massively overstates private welfare. Massively. We've already seen society that only had private welfare - look to our societies before public welfare existed, and you'll see that private welfare was basically a toy.

It doesn't even pass the sniff test; the idea that all these people whining about having to give up their money to other people would start giving up their money to other people if it was 'voluntary'? And people actually get sucked in by this argument?

Keep in mind that under our current system, to a large extent giving up your money voluntarily to other people (charitable donations) gets you an exemption from giving up your money involuntarily (taxes).

So if they're not giving it to charity to avoid paying the taxes they whine about, why should we believe that they'll give it to charity if we get rid of taxation?

People with higher incomes give more to charity. People with more disposable income give more to charity. Government "charity" consumes about 70 percent of the money in bureaucratic overhead. Private charity overheads are typically below 30 percent, and much better in many cases. What you want is more money in the pockets of people so that they can give more to charity. Any dollar spent on voluntary charity vs taxes is much more efficiently used to help the needy directly. If you really care about poor people you should want more money going directly to private charities not the government. In fact, private charities were a much bigger part of day to day society before the welfare state and poverty was decreasing between the 40s and 60s. When the government steps in it changes people's behaviour and takes away more and more of their disposable income. I know you'll find this hard to believe but its true the richest in our society give more than anyone else to charity.

Government welfare gets money to all locations over the long term. Private charity does well in short, acute phases (eg hurricane relief), but over the long term, it's only useful for socially attractive services - and even then, it's not enough. 'kids with cancer' charities do a lot better than 'young adults with mental illness' charities, which in turn do better than 'disabled people who need 24-hour care for life' charities.

> poverty was decreasing between the 40s and 60s

... something which had little do to with welfare or private charity.

> I know you'll find this hard to believe but its true the richest in our society give more than anyone else to charity.

I don't find it hard to believe at all. What you're finding hard to believe is that even though the rich give more than others, it's still a drop in the bucket compared to government-supplied assistance.

intuitively people with higher incomes should more to charity. However, a recent study found the rich DO NOT give a higher proportion of their income to charity. Incomes of $25,000 or less a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes; those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent.

There are certainly a number of things that could explain this.

I forgot to add, if you don't like the job a charity is doing, you can give your money to a different charity. With government, not so much.

Well the problem is a lot of welfare that we have now wouldn't have typically exist as welfare before it's institution. An example would be the destruction of the family unit which has lead to an entire class of single mothers who depend on welfare who simply did not exist in previous generations.

Nonsense. There were plenty of single-mother families before welfare. Men often died in industry or off at war. Life was excruciatingly difficult for these people, and private charity simply did not cut it. This is the kind of things that 'widows and orphans funds' were for, but they were never enough.

When people help each other it's called "community". Its a social behavior as old as history.

Community cannot be coerced.

Unrelated - money is no longer on gold-standard it is on labor standard. One US dollar is equal to an amount of productivity. They cannot be decoupled without dangerous effects. Gold was once an efficient measure of labor and was hence a form of money. Labor is and has always been the unitary method of exchange.

> We've already seen society that only had private welfare - look to our societies before public welfare existed, and you'll see that private welfare was basically a toy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of confounding variables in that comparison, namely those associated with the passage of time.

> Some libertarians support the Basic Income Guarantee only if our only choice is between our current system and abolishing it for the Basic Income Guarantee.

What exactly would be replaced? It's tough googling around for how much the US government spends on welfare each year, at least partly because it's not exactly clear what counts as welfare. It seems like it's somewhere between 0.3 and 1 trillion dollars per year. If it's a trillion dollars, that's only $3,000 per person, or maybe double that if it starts at age 18 (although that sounds like a condition to me).

Isn't that not enough? As in, it must be a lot lower than the welfare benefits some Americans are currently getting.

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