(09-01-2018, 05:33 PM)jj82284 Wrote:

(09-01-2018, 02:53 PM)mikesez Wrote: Milton Friedman advocated a universal basic income. he also said that the only defense we needed against pharmaceutical companies poisoning us was the right to sue them. He said the FDA should go away.  I'll stick with Keynes, thanks.

Friedman advocated a negative income tax.  Had the federal government adopted his structure instead of the micro managing families top down structure of the great society then we wouldn't have the destruction of families that lead to literally millions of people being caught in generational poverty and millions more killed in the womb.  

As for the FDA, you're right.  The illusion of security provided by ten years of additional cost that has made medicine so expensive that people think they have no chance of paying for it themselves is well worth the high premiums high deductibles and defect nationalization of 1/6th of the US Economy.  It's amazing how otherwise rational sane people can be so taken with the debunked promises of the state that they have either put aside or forgotten the basic common sense tenants of capitalism, 'Mutual Self Interest.'  

As for Keynes, state intervention has been tried.  10 trillion dollars of deficit spending produced the first administration in history to never hit 3%gdp.  The interventions of the great deal massively lengthened the depression.  How much destruction and tyranny does the state have to perpetrate before we stop believing in it and romantacizing it's advocates?

I'm pretty sure Milt's goal with what he called a "negative income tax" was to create a minimum income.  In any case we sort of implemented the "negative income tax" with the Earned Income Tax Credit and I don't know how Friedman felt about that.  

While I hope there could be ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to get a new medicine approved, I think its not usually ten years anymore, I wouldn't ever go to the extreme of saying that the FDA was a bad idea in the first place. Wow.

I think we agree on the idea that there is such a thing as the government stimualting the economy.  This is what the recent tax cuts did.  It's what most tax cuts do in the short term.  Spending is also a form of stimulus, though, and government stimulus, whether new tax cuts or new spending, is most needed when times are bad.  When all the self interested individuals are tightening their belts and slowing the circular flow of money, the government should, temporarily, push in the opposite direction.  And the government should tighten up when times are good so that it has ways to easily loosen when things inevitably get bad again.

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