Liberty Alone

In this post Jock got me thinking. The key lines are these:

the welfare state as conceived by these reformers was a necessary but essentially temporary measure only needed in an economic system that favoured the land-owner, capitalist and banker.

I think that this should be the aim of all welfare, we should be aiming for a situation where nobody needs it due to lack of income.

Take a health service, surely the most liberal system would be a laissez-faire free market one in which everyone can participate. That is nobody is denied health care due to no fault of their own, but with no need for government intervention to ensure that. Whilst that clearly is a long way off at the moment, we should be aiming towards it., something the NHS does not do.

Watching Walter Block and Boyd Blundell debate unions and the minimum wage Blundell made the most absurd argument:

He accepted Block’s reasoning that demonstrated that the minimum wage causes unemployment, but then proceeded to argue that removing the minimum wage is a bad thing. Block made the point that removing the minimum wage means more money to the least skilled (and therefore poorest), this was countered by Blundell saying that this is bad because it means the poorest have to work when they could be doing other things.

Just a minute. He expects me to work hard, spending lots of time at work therefore denying me the opportunity to do other more fun things, so that my money can be given to people to allow them to not work? I think I see a problem with the incentives here.
I don’t mind providing some support for those who are struggling to make ends meet. I’d prefer that to be transparent and ideally voluntary and to be going towards supporting those few who cannot work and those who are working but still find it difficult to earn money.

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 ;) )