What if we pay people to go to school, not in the form of getting a job later, but as something like Negative Tuition?

It keeps people socially engaged, their hands/minds active (not idle), and it increases human knowledge. It removes the obvious economic barriers to "opportunity" that libertarians dream about.

When/if you get to an idea that hasn't been tried, give it a go. If you fail, back to the drawing board. Compare this against our current system of loans and bankruptcies that clearly serves only a small portion of the population.

I read Capitalism & Freedom in college, and I recall a chapter in which Friedman argues that racial segregation would inevitably fail in a free market because someone will want to profit off that untapped minority market.

From that point on I've pretty much written him off as a head-in-the-clouds quack.

Everyone associated with the Chicago School and “Law and Economics” is going to age very poorly. Distilled to its core, it’s a fancy pants nonsense justification for exploitation.

It does seem optimal for people to work jobs because they want to work them, rather than by economic necessity.

Anyone reading this who does gaf about their job/profession I'm sure can name a dozen colleagues who phone it in, ****ing others over, doing just enough to cash their check and dodge oversight.

The worst thing that happened to this country over the last 35 years was the short term thinking of Baby Boomers. They didn't do the most +EV thing... they did the thing that got them the most now. I suspect that where this behavior has been rampant we'll see greatly reduced returns over the next 20 years or so as the damage unwinds. Many are woefully unprepared for the future, selling late stage products that are in steep decline, and further have weak balance sheets that give them no margin for error.

Right now the most someone can earn on welfare where I live is about $750/mo, which is about 1/3 of what a full-time minimum wage job pays. The median rent for a studio apartment is $1,900, and there are currently about 200 rooms for rent in the city (population 2.8 million) listed at $750 or less. It is unfathomable to me that a government would ever offer income support at a level that allowed people to afford both rent and food, let alone other expenses, while expanding​ eligibility to the entire population.

However, even if they did so, according to Screamin Asian, if you watch the video, you'll see that even Milton Friedman concedes that a negative income tax doesn't eliminate the need for social workers. Do you disagree with Friedman on this point?

gregorio,

Have you considered rewatching the video?

It's a fair point. In this particular case I wonder how many times it has to be restated and either not understood or ignored before posters are cleared to assume the bad posting might be bad faith.

The OP and/or title should be edited to correct the misinformation as Mr. Malmuth's threads probably get lots of reads. This is assuming it's not posted in bad faith.

To be clear, the misinformation is implying the GND includes a provision for money given people unwilling to work when it does not. It's important because this has been a bad-faith partisan attack point against the GND.

All the best.

Friedman is the brainchild behind payroll tax withholding, great guy

rather, the payroll tax withholding is Friedman's brainchild

This is a tremendously oversimplified and wrong analysis. If the Trump tax cuts are "good for the poker economy" then the GND would be the same. This is assuming they are 'funded' in the same way -- deficit spending.

One person's (or govt) spending is someone else's income.

Objectively the GND would be likely be better than the tax cuts since the bulk of the tax cut $ went to the wealthy, and that money is likely to have a lower velocity of spending than when provided to the lower classes. This is also the same reason that even if it was 'paid for' dollar for dollar with tax increases on the more well-to-do, it would still be "good for the poker economy".

SAME THING IMO

Oh you sweet summer brainchild

Where I work a lot of people are already being paid (public money, too) to not work, so I really don't see what is so radical about this idea.

I wasn't arguing that Friedman's proposal works that way. Read my post.

I didn't assume he was guilty or aware.

Is anyone willing to take one for the team, watch the whole video and summarise its points succinctly? I don't think I can do more than a minute of Friedman.

Here's a summary I found on Medium - with quotes that may/may not come from the video but it is one of the 3 sources linked in the article.

Why Milton Friedman Supported a Guaranteed Income (5 Reasons)

I am unwilling to work on that.

I can't be the only person who has definitely watched this before and doesn't really care to see it again. My interest in rehashing ideas from pure theorists who independently confirmed it by thinking about it is pretty low these days since we have more data and tools than ever before. Stiglitz says it better:

Lawnmower Man,

Have you considered re-watching the video, though?

i don't like these jokes by people who haven't watched the video telling other people to watch the video. mason wants us to all watch this video, and he's hosting this wonderful forum for us which we all love and appreciate. the least we could do is watch the video in full and have a productive conversation about it itt.

thanks

Or -- and I'm just spitballing here -- if you don't want to watch and discuss the video don't make post after post passive aggressively antagonizing the owner of the forum because you can't possibly be expected to watch a fifteen minute video.

thank you keeed

Friedman isn't even that AIDS to watch. My criticism of watching Friedman videos is a lot of them overlap in content.

My criticism of Friedman as an ideologue more so than an economist in his videos is he couldn't come to terms with markets not being infallible.