May 24, 2006
"The Plan"
There's a book been published recently called In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. "The Plan", as it were, is to completely eliminate all forms of governmental redistributivist plans including, but not limited to, corporate subsidies, Social Security, the Mediplans, welfare, student aid, food stamps, farm subsidies, etc. Instead, replace them with a simple $10,000 grant to every American citizen aged 21 or more.
TCS has a two part series on the subject (part one, two) describing those who are most likely to oppose such a plan.
The first are libertarian types who insist that there shouldn't be any redistribution going on, period. The author's response? "[I]n a democracy, ideas that get 0.34% of the popular vote tend not, whatever their ideological purity, to get taken all that seriously when it comes to public policy."
The second are conservative types who think that you should have to do something to get by. His response: "[W]hat makes you think that the current welfare system is any better?"
But it's the potential liberal objections that really spark interest. They could be from either "[t]hose in the political system simply for the joy of the power they get to exercise [or] those in that very same system simply so they can suck at the teat of the public money cash cow." "As with other interest groups, the very worst thing that can happen is that a problem actually gets solved: if it does, how can the membership be galvanized into donating so that another power lunch can be taken?"
How'd you like to cast into immediate and permenant unemployment, tens of thousands of bureaucrats? Sounds like the kind of unemployment our society could really use.
I don't know all the details of the plan, but if it hasn't already been suggested, I'd say that citizens under 21 should have their $10k invested in a private account, so that by the time they're 21 they'll have about $250k.
