Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Social safety nets that are available to EVERYONE allow people to take risks and try things. That and limited liability companies.

I have a saying: "Companies create products. People live lives." If you want to do something, start a company and have it be subject to market discipline. But people should have a safety net to shield them from the market's full discipline. When companies run out of resources, they close. When people do, they often become homeless and hungry or worse.

So in short ... ANY kind of safety net that is available to ALL people (whether it's basic income, or negative tax ala Milton Friedman, or something else) will do this. There doesn't have to be any concept of "wage earner" or "entrepreneur", just how much income you make as a person. (I am ignoring here the repetitive schemes some would use to hide their personal income by making their company purchase things.)

And those of you who are for the free market and think the "poor" would have a moral hazard and wouldn't work if they got free money ... look at the word "free" in free market. Is a person who can't afford the SWITCHING COSTS of educating themselves for another career or starting a business, and forced to do the same sort of job in order to feed their family, really a "free" participant in the labor market choosing from among the available options? Or are they artificially kept locked into a particular industry because they can't afford the costs to switch between their options?

Free does not mean that you are uninhibited by circumstances. The free in free market means you are not coerced into action by other actors. You are free to act by your own will as long as you do not attempt to coerce others.

Safety net for anyone provided by government must first take resources from individuals by force to provide it.

Don't confuse the two things. Force is not 100% or 0%. In your system the "men with guns" still come to evict you from your house when you fail to pay the rent, therefore you are coerced into earning money.

You pay attention to the "force" used on the taxpayer. When you do business in a jurisdiction then it often imposes taxes, but you are free not to do business there.

But what about the "force" used on the person living paycheck to paycheck? The government enFORCEs property rights (or, without government, it would be private mercenaries that do it) and so the wage earner is still forced to do what he doesn't necessarily want to do.

So although it may be that neither your employer nor any individual is coercing you to work for that industry, nevertheless you can be coerced by the system. Because what is force, really? Can you give me an example of force? Perhaps nanobots in your bloodstream forcing you to do something is force. Because if someone puts a gun to your head, you still have a choice: you can choose to die, or do what he says. The point is that force is whenever your alternative options are completely unacceptable to you. And homelessness / hunger for days are such things. Exposing humans to market discipline without ANY safety nets results in many of them being coerced -- not by an individual -- but by their circumstances -- to continue in a path that may not benefit them or even others. J K Rowling was for example able to make Harry Potter into a billion dollar industry only because she was able to afford to write it. She was a welfare recipient at the time.

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