Charles Murray wrote a book called A Plan to Replace the Welfare State and in it he suggests that we replace the welfare state. Instead the government would make a no-strings-attached payment of US$10,000 a year to every citizen (who wasn't in prison). Then the government would essentially withdraw from all areas of social welfare. So no public health care or public education. You'd have to enforce a minimum level of expenditure on health insurance.
I reckon it is not a bad idea and I have been wondering about similar things of late. Although I suspect we'd rapidly find that governments are actually pretty spectacularly good at keeping our nations running smoothly, despite all their little foibles.
We had a discussion about this in my Social Policy class last semester, pretty much the whole tutorial took about 7min to decide that we’d all actually rather pay more taxes in exchange for more services. So to cover the other 43 min of the tut our tutor (who is actually highly left wing and a member of the greens) found himself having to make increasingly strong right wing arguments in order to get the 25 or 30 of us to talk more about it.
Miles / 7:00pm / 13 August 2007
Yeah. I must admit. The “problem” of big government doesn’t strike me as society’s most pressing issue.
Ryan / 7:42am / 14 August 2007
Charles Murray of the “Bell Curve” fame? Check out his theories on race and intelligence.
margaret / 10:25am / 14 August 2007
I’m totally open to the idea that IQ might be genetic and different between races, but I think you’re going to have one hell of a time showing it. From the little bit I read of the evidence that guy presents, they haven’t even come close. As they tell you first day in high school statistics, correlation is not causation.
I don’t have a lot of time for people using large quantities of low-quality statistics to push an ideological agenda.
But just because the guy is a jerk, doesn’t mean all his ideas are wrong or bad. Just like when Hitler invented the spoon.
Ryan / 12:01pm / 14 August 2007