Other Welfare Possibilities
(Continued from; Objections
to This Welfare Program)
It is interesting to note that even if we never have such
a welfare system on a national level, the states might be able
to implement something similar. If a few did they might find
that recipients of help decide to move to other states where
the financial assistance doesn't have to be repaid. This may
sound like a problem, but everyone who currently receives help
could still get it, and even more help might be available for
problems which are often ignored at the moment, like homelessness.
If many potential recipients do move, they will increase the
financial costs in the states they move to. If that becomes a
problem it would perhaps encourage those states to implement
their own similar changes to their welfare programs. In fact,
this effect suggests that systems like these would spread quickly
once a few states adopted them.
By the way, the concept of governments lending rather than
giving free money goes beyond welfare. It might be applied to
all redistributionist schemes. To the extent possible we could
make people pay more directly for what they consume in goods
and services, including those provided by governments. My hunch
is that such systems would encourage greater self-reliance, while
still providing all the necessary help for those who are unable
to meet their needs from their own efforts.
For example, why should the single woman waiting tables, who
chooses not to have children, be heavily taxed--as she is now--to
pay for the children of millionaires to go to public schools?
Make people pay the costs of schooling their children, and if
they can't right now, the debt will be added to their tax bill
as a surcharge, again at the maximum rate of 10% of their current
income. Educating children, since it is a basic responsibility
of parenting, should probably remain mandatory, although cheaper
alternatives (home schooling for one) might become more prevalent
if the market was allowed to operate freely.
We also might see fewer children born if people ever had to
pay anything close to the true cost of their decision to have
them. You can decide for yourself if that's a good or bad thing
for society (it certainly would reduce population pressures on
the planet). In any case, I like the idea of not paying for children
I never chose to have, and I suspect that many childless or one-child
couples would feel the same way.
There are almost certainly other area where we could apply
this concept of a helping hand in the form of a lending hand.
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