Even if you’re a moderate Hayek-Friedman pro-welfare-state libertarian who does not think taxation or inflation are indistinguishable from theft, it’s still impossible to convince most liberals of this:
- It’s best to just maximize growth rates, pre-tax distribution be damned, and then fund wicked-good social insurance with huge revenues from an optimal tax scheme.
It’s not even clear to me what’s especially libertarian about this. It’s sorta just anodyne welfare-state liberalism plus economics. I’d be elated to get just this. When a not insignificant group of liberals start saying, “Of course! Of course this is what we should do!” then I’ll feel we’re really cooking with gas, and I won’t care what we call it.
Sane (economically literate) conservative positions would be:
- Use incentives to encourage employment.
- Kill minimum wages, use flat taxes, and structure welfare like an upside-down N. Very little if you're not working...but as you work more, your welfare payments go UP with your income. Somewhere ($50K?), it reverses direction, and slowy fades to 0 near 50K. Ditch-digging for welfare eligibity. Especially work to kill bad marginal tax rates.
- Use incentives to encourage marriage & age-appropriate childrearing.
- Flat tax rate, no deductions, except an increasing per-person deduction. 1st person, $5000...2nd person $6000...3rd person $7000. Include seniors. Stop throwing all black men in prison for drug crimes. No money for dependents if you're under 18.
- Use incentives to discourage criminality
- Panopticon in public, with automatic, immediate, physical punishment and reparations. Computers should write the arrest warrants.
But for God's sake...don't make everyone's life suck by killing growth rates, just to do some 3rd order effect that is marginally good.
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Kill minimum wages, use flat taxes, and structure welfare like an upside-down N.
Starts at 0, rises up, and then falls again. That looks like a right way up n (not N) to me.
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