Basic Income and Soylent | Hacker News Reader

Basic Income and Soylent

scottsantens.com

9 pointsimartin2k5 comments

of course welfare is limiting choices, it's the globalist's way of making people lazy and weak. basic income would be better than welfare. and no taxes and less regulations would be better than basic income. <infowars.com>

I completely disagree with your comments.

What globalists? Sources? Name them.

Welfare is a system with a good purpose, but poor implementation. The goal is to help lift people up who are down and out. It turns out it's incredibly difficult to get groups of people on their feet with minimal monetary assistance. I have heard lots of people refer to welfare recipients as lazy, but have never heard anyone in any sort of position of authority say that laziness is the goal.

No taxes means no military, interstate highways, FDA, FBI, post office, nationak parks, federal courts, etc.

No taxes means NO regulations and NO federal laws, since taxes pay for the people who enforce regulations and laws. no regulations means the country is given to the strongest corporations with 0 oversight. Dump chemicals wherever you want, put whatever you want in food (sawdust, bleach, etc), etc.

Passing a federal law does nothing without a federal government to enforce it.

Congress empowers agencies so they can monitor and regulate an industry for the public good. Otherwise congress would have to pass a law for every little thing which would bog the government down. People get upset about regulations, but a lot of them exist because some person or organization did something to harm the public interest and a regulation was created to prevent it from happening again.

Can agencies get out of control? Absolutely, and it's congress's job to rein them in. While they report to the president all theirs power comes form the legislative branch.

As an aside? Why do you have infowars.com at the end of your comment? Infowars isn't a source appropriate for this forum

The government can charge rent for utilisation of land and other natural resources. That's not the same thing as a tax, and it can be morally justified.

Revenue from such rent would be enough to cover the government dealing with externalities, whether that be generating positive externalities or reducing negative ones.

Welfare is a nonvoluntary transfer of income, to force one party to provide for the basic needs of another. It can't happen in a free society. It leads to an explosion in single parenthood. When a guaranteed income is conditioned only on a person existing, then you will encourage people to bring people into existence at the lowest possible cost to themselves. That's indeed what the statistics show for Western countries over the last 40 years.

The birth rates in Western countries have been plummeting for the last 40 years. In fact, birth rates globally are declining almost everywhere except in countries that are still too poor to provide things like welfare. The data does not support your position.

The rate of single parenthood (particularly low income single parenthood) has been exploding in the West, concurrent with rising social welfare spending.

As for the general birthrate, that seems to be affected by income, not the availability of welfare. This is indicated by examples like Hong Kong and Singapore, which have much lower levels of welfare than most developed countries, and much lower birthrates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com