Friday Talking Points (301) -- Seven More Amendments

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. Some of those are things the state can't and shouldn't guarantee.

What the state should use taxes to provide, I think, are

:-Free education up to age 18
:-Free at point of use medical care for all
:-A certain minimum level of income (set at a level sufficient to cover food, clothing and housing from Roosevelt's list, but to be spent how the recipient sees fit).
:-The protection of the law, the emergency services and the armed forces.
:-Infrastructure - roads, pipes, cables etc.

Trying to guarantee employment is not a sensible economic policy - it would just lead to pointless makework being created. Let anyone who can supply labour that someone else wants to pay for at a mutually agreeable rate work, and provide the rest (and possibly those working, too) with unemployment benefit/social security/citizen's income/whatever you want to call it, paid for from taxation.

And first-world agricultural subsidies, in particular, are utterly shameful and a major cause of third-world poverty, and should end.