Reddit mentions of In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State

> That seems to conflict with things like welfare. Some people commit welfare fraud, but we don't throw out the whole thing.

Few welfare systems assume good actors. If someone commits welfare fraud, that is illegal, and they can be punished for it, and the vast majority of systems have some sort of method to identify cheaters. This is one of the things that makes welfare so inefficient, in fact...the bureaucracy needed to prevent fraud costs more than the the fraud, but without it, there would likely be significantly more fraud. Either way that inefficiency is always going to be in the system.

This is personally why I'd prefer a system like Charles Murray's universal basic income, where we replace all current redistributive welfare systems for a simple UBI. The requirements to receive UBI would be: over 21, citizen. If you are earning over (iirc) 30k per year, you progressively reduce the amount of UBI you receive until half at 60k...everyone gets at least half that meets the basic requirements. The only additional requirement is that a small portion of the UBI must be spent on health insurance (all citizens must have health insurance. His book, In Our Hands, goes into additional detail about why this could work.

The short term advantage is that fraud is far less of an issue...everyone is receiving it, so there are less checks needed to determine if someone is eligible, and the other requirements are easy to check (income, health insurance status, citizen) via existing databases, so most of the bureaucracy can be eliminated. It also gets rid of some of the stigma, since if 100% of people are receiving all or part of the UBI, no individuals are unfairly getting government handouts. It changes welfare from a redistribution system that only benefits the few to a universally agreed upon social net. There are many other benefits as well.

Most of the systems you're talking about, such as state sickleave, unemployment, etc., would be unnecessary if everyone had a reliable basic income. You would always have a fallback, and wouldn't need to go through a ton of paperwork to get there.

I doubt it will ever happen, but I'd much prefer it to the failing welfare state that has done more to harm minorities in the past 30 years than white supremacy has done in the past 100.

>We're not talking about legalizing ghosting, but rather about no longer punishing sex.

I'm not sure I understand this. How is dealing with the consequences of your choices a punishment? If I get into a car accident, and am required to take my car to a shop, file an insurance claim, and get medical treatment, am I being punished for driving a car? Or is that simply a risk involved with the activity, that we all understand when choosing to drive?

I'm not convinced state-sponsoring relief from consequences of human choice is going to benefit individuals in the long term, and certainly not society.

You sound like you are more politically-right oriented. Here's a great recent interview with someone from the right discussing why he supports a basic income, and how he suggests we go about it.

No it doesn't have the numbers you seek, but his book certainly does, if you want to read it:

"In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State" by Charles Murray