[orangecat]

Maybe we do need to bite the socialism bullet, and instead of Social Security, give everyone a guaranteed minimum income with a negative income tax.

I'm a small-l libertarian and I support that in principle, because it's no more socialist than what we have today. We've already decided that we aren't going to let people starve, or die due to lack of basic health care. So given that, it's more efficient to just give everybody enough money for survival than to have hundreds of government agencies trying to fulfill specific needs, or to impose protectionist policies for the purpose of keeping inefficient jobs. That would also get rid of the perverse incentives that the working poor often face, where it's possible to get a raise and end up worse off because your benefits go to zero.

[jeffool]

Huh. I'll have to run this by some other libertarian pals. Interesting.