A liberal aim
A thought just occurred to me - an aim for liberals should be for every person to be able to live independently of the state, without state handouts, without state subsidy of health care or education. How can you be free if you depend on the state for your income, health or education?
Rather than aiming for a welfare state, we should aim to have no need for one. Rather than supporting the NHS we should be aiming for a situation where everyone can afford personal private health insurance. Rather than supporting the status quo in education we should be aiming for a system of private education which everyone can afford.
Such aims are far away, but there are some steps which can easily be made - reduce taxation, especially on the poor, giving them more disposable income.
Education could easily be moved in the right direction by switching to a full voucher system with the opportunity for individual state sector schools to go private or independent of their LEA.
Benefits should be simplified, reduced to a few, based on income for the most part.
Health is far more difficult to transition and indeed to find a solution which will ween people off the state whilst not leaving people stranded (although the NHS is not universal anyway). First step would be to dismantle the behemoth and pass power to the local areas and to have local funding.
Along with these we of course need a healthy competitive economy so naturally free trade and lower regulation are required.
Whether its totally achievable to have everyone living independently of the state is debatable (some argue that mutual societies and charities would allow this - perhaps they would, perhaps they wouldn’t) but I certainly think that a large majority of people could live without state subsidy and almost everyone today could live with a lower level of subsidy.
Just some thoughts, but I stand by the idea that to be free we should be as independent of the state as possible, and that’s a lot more independent than we are today (I’m sure holes can be picked in my other ideas though ;) )
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February 1st, 2007 at 11:47 am
I was going to blog about a liberal approach to poverty reduction a few weeks back but work overtook me.
Rather than supporting “incomes” perhaps we should try to focus on enabling more people to attain “financial freedom”. Such an approach needs to focus more on capital ownership of income producing assets rather than on income from work/benefits.
It’s a century now since many economists were mulling over what would happen when we are able to achieve most menial tasks through automation (or, as has happened recently, exporting them to other countries). And people still focus on more or less “full employment” as the way of distributing purchasing power to the many. While the global oligarchy is able to live off its accumulated capital.
February 5th, 2007 at 9:33 am
That’s a good point.
I’m not sure how to develop it further however.
February 5th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
A society of people not reliant upon the state for the basic necessities of life?!
What kind of crazy nonsense is this?!
Sadly, as I noted in a post on 2nd January, more than half of eligible voters in the UK now live through the State’s largesse, either as employees, pensioners or welfare recipients. The private sector creators of wealth are in a minority! It will be hard indeed to convince the State’s chattels that their interests are best served by reducing the size of the handouts they receive.
This is a shame, because David B. Smith, Visiting Professor in Business and Economic Forecasting at the University of Derby and a visiting lecturer at the Cardiff University Business School, believes that “If government spending, as a proportion of national income, had been held at the level experienced in 1960 [c.33% of GDP, instead of 43-48% over the past forty years], econometric evidence suggests that output in the UK would, today, be nearly twice as high as current levels. Total public expenditure would then be higher, albeit as a lower proportion of a much bigger national output.”
Presumably, with twice as much wealth per head of population, we’d all be rich enough to afford far better health and education, and so we would not need such a large welfare state. Sadly, our parents and grandparents mortgaged our future.
I feel a fresh post coming on!