(09-01-2018, 08:46 PM)mikesez Wrote: (09-01-2018, 05:33 PM)jj82284 Wrote: 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.
a.)It's worth the time to actually check out the difference between the negative income tax and the UBI. No one, on the right or the left believes that we should fundamentally leave people on the side of the street to die in the name of a pure laisse faire society, Hayek wrote about it in road to Serfdom for crying out loud. The greater question then becomes how do we on the one hand help those truly in need in such a way that does not create a permanent disincentive to work. Friedman actually solves that problem in a very simple way, unfortunately too simple and too effective for our betters in Washington to allow it to come to pass.
And this isn't just some passing difference. I am deadly serious when I say that we are looking at millions upon millions of people trapped in generational poverty and aborted as a result of the unannounced consequences of government distortions in the market caused by the way we structure the myriad of welfare payments and family assistance.
b.)Think like an engineer. Good intentions and good feelings don't count. Does an institution or entity make things more efficient or less efficient. We give this institution all this immense power and we have higher drug costs, more prescription overdoses than illicit overdoses and the truly sickest amongst us have to march through the halls of congress just to try an experimental drug that may save their life, at a risk they are willing to take to avoid a sentence of certain death.
c.) Quite the contrary. first, lets clearly reiterate that we just went through the greatest deficit based expansion of government spending in the history of history. The result? The slowest recovery since the last time we tried to use government spending to get us out of a recession (The great depression.)
In the second place, there is a vast difference between government spending and tax cuts in terms of economic stimulus. In the case of Government spending, its understood that the government itself doesn't actually have any money. Every dollar spent, is understood to eventually have to come out of the economy in the form of either taxes or inflation. This actually creates a DISINCENTIVE for capital investment (the real driver of economic growth.) On the contrary, Tax cuts allow more money to be left in the private market in any given taxable transaction which has the short term affect of increased spending, but also the long term and more substantial impact of welcoming private capital for investment at a higher rate of return. It's not just the 2000 the apple employee gets to keep on their personal tax returns, or even the bonus they might get because of the lower corporate tax rate. It's also the 350 billion dollars that apple decides to invest in the country, reinforcing decisions already made by the market, not trying to correct them.
Moreover, what is a correction? As capital is allocated to create growth, then there is inevitable misallocation in a human system. Rebalancing is NECESSARY for the health of the market. What you and Keynes propose is that a select few would be in charge of massive discharges of wealth they didn't create or have any ties to in order to override the corrections in the market. The simple problem with that thesis is that it is more likely that the select few, dripping in morale hazard, will make even bigger misallocations of resources which inevitably lead to inefficiency, malaise and even more massive corrections (2008). Ironically Keynes first proposed the idea of government intervention and public works in response to a recession that he ACKNOWLEDGES was caused by state mismanagement of monetary policy!
