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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (7825)	12/21/2005 5:01:35 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

I once floated the logical extension of monetarizing everything on the POP thread, but it didn't get a welcome reception. Basically we replace our current monetary system with metamoney, which simply tracks all economic interactions, and maintains a lifelong record which becomes inherited by your heirs as well. You and your heirs reap all rewards and all risks for the some total of all your lifelong actions. You buy nuke energy today, and 50 years from now, the cost of waste disposal goes through the roof, and your heirs find themselves penniless. That would be pure economic Libertarianism No it wouldn't. 1 - It would require a huge amount of state intervention to implement. 2 - It penalizes some people for the actions of others. Lets look at your specific example. Suppose I use energy from a nuclear plant. I might not have much of a choice, I don't control the utility. But lets overlook that or assume it is my decision. I have used the energy. My decedents (if I have any) have not. Even if you can look past that, what if nuclear waste disposal does get expensive, but also using nuclear energy allows us to use less fossil fuels and thus lessens or eliminates problems from global warming? The eventual real or potential costs are probably too complicated to figure out even after the fact. And reasonably to impose the cost for actions taken today I think you should have to be able to at least approximate the cost before the fact. Tim

To: neolib who wrote (7825)	12/21/2005 5:57:15 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

Or alternately, why not do away with collectivism on the negative side, and make all debts and damages one might cause in one’s life be part of one’s estate? Whether you convert the responsibility of an individual's debts to the lenders and the collective as you do with bankruptcy or to his offspring, as you propose, you're still taking the load off him. I find the alternatives equally unattractive. His debts should be his own and no one else's. There's no more basis to penalize his offspring than his lenders. The lenders in most cases bear some of the fault. His grandchildren are innocent. I've searched, but without much luck for a modern expose of Libertarianism which is grounded in reality. There is no libertarian movement, not really. Libertarians are mostly just quietly so, making their own individual decisions--to the extent that the collective lets them, that is. Walking the walk, so to speak. The other problem is that, were a movement, it would be primarily a negative movement. It would be to stop doing this or that as opposed to start doing something else. The absence of something is hard to communicate, hard to sell.