Now for the safety net part. All people 18 years of age or older who are citizens or legal residents and who earn no income at all would receive a stipend from the government of $15,000 per year, broken up into monthly payments to their ATM accounts of $1,250 per month. It wouldn’t matter if they were students, just lost their job to automation or were even just plain lazy. However, for every dollar those people earned between one and $30,000, they would lose 50 cents of their stipend. That not only means everyone would always have an incentive to earn the extra dollar, people also could less fearfully pursue a new career, start a new business or work in the arts or public service for little or no pay. As a result, income in the amount of $30,000 would be the cutoff point at which people pay no taxes nor receive any stipend. This approach would also very likely remedy the homeless problem because, with access to $1,250 per month per person, the private sector would quickly supply modest room and board facilities to those people. So how is Liberty involved? Because this is a system that we would voluntarily implement, because that is who we are. And I believe it would work – for everyone! What do you think?
Judge Jim Gray (Ret.)
2012 Libertarian candidate for Vice President,
along with Governor Gary Johnson as the candidate for President
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One of the beauties of Liberty is seen by transactions that are consummated by willing buyers and willing sellers of their legal contracts. But often this beauty is tarnished by government intervention. As an example, take the minimum wage laws. If an under-educated and low-skilled worker will accept a job for $10 per hour, and an employer will benefit from hiring that worker, both parties benefit. But if the laws require the employer to pay workers a minimum wage of $15 per hour, the lower-skilled workers will lose their job opportunities both to higher-skilled workers and to automation.
When I was in the Peace Corps in the small town of Palmar Norte, Costa Rica, I stayed in a set of upstairs cubicles where the other “professors” in the high school stayed during the school year, and which was on the second floor of the only place in town that could hold a dance. It was run by a man named Chunga, who had left Mainland China when Chiang Kai-shek was overthrown by Mao Zedung in the late 1940s. During one of my conversations with Chunga I told him that I had noticed that almost all of the shops in our town were run by Chinese, and asked him if there was a reason for that. He responded to me that, of course, after Mao’s revolution many anti-communists fled to Taiwan and others kept on going to Hawaii. But many others also continued all the way to the West Coast of most countries in the Western Hemisphere. But when they arrived in their new land, they followed an ancient custom.
Revolutions! Arab Spring! Throw Out the Colonial Powers! Liberty for the People! For many movements throughout recent and past history these have been rallying cries, and often for good reason. But almost always there is a cost to revolution, and often it is unacceptably high. For example, and as stated in the “World in 2017” edition of The Economist, this year is the 100-year anniversary of Lenin seizing power from the Bolsheviks in Russia, which led to a lengthy succession of tragedies: Stalin’s rise to power, the death of more than 20 million people as a result of the collectivization of agriculture and forced industrialization and, in many ways in reaction to communism, the rise of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The French Revolution soon gave rise to the active use of the guillotine, and Mao’s revolution in China also imposed collectivism that directly led to the deaths of millions. Unfortunately, with the increased popularity of populism, which has resulted from the large disparity of wealth in our society, many of the same seeds are present today that gave rise to those failed revolutions.
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