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Politics and Economics
...Ok, so maybe, per Reich, people are having to work multiple jobs to get their full-time hours. Luckily, the BLS has the numbers: fewer workers hold multiple jobs now than they did 20 years ago, although the total number employed is much greater. So much for that theory.
The private sector can’t do everything – we need government, regulations, and taxes. But why are government agencies so encumbered by bureaucratic inefficiency? Here are some possible reasons....
In the market place, value boils down to the point of overlap between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers are willing to accept. Value is not a property of the object but of the transaction.
Both action and inaction have consequences. To the extent that these consequences matter to us, we have to decide what to do and what not to do – often under conditions of uncertainty and risk. None of this has to do with “free will”.
Bottom line: more police, less prison time. The DOJ piece says prison doesn’t have much deterrence effect – but if it had no deterrence effect, being caught would have no deterrence effect. How much prison or jail time is enough to make one think twice before committing to some criminal act
A living wage is the hourly rate that an individual must earn to support their family, if they are the sole provider and are working full-time (2080 hours per year). As adopted in the US, living wages are often set so that a full-time worker with a family of four earns more than some measure of poverty (usually the official federal poverty line).
The BIG would also make it easier to leave dysfunctional relationships. Abused women in particular would have another source of income to help them move out and start over.
BIG would have to be designed in such a way that it would not create a huge disincentive to work. You don’t want to shrink the pool of tax payers, at least not by a lot. Ultimately, it would be the taxpayers who pay for BIG, not to mention all those other things governments do. And you don’t want the tax base too narrowly focused on the affluent, because the income of the rich is more volatile than that of other income classes. A stable BIG needs a stable source of funding, which means a pretty broad tax base. The 1% can’t pay for everything.
The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is a form of government benefit in which all citizens or legal residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money. Some libertarians like the BIG, because it would provide a simple alternative to the morass of means-tested government programs that are associated with dependency, gaming the system, and work avoidance. Liberals like the BIG as a way to combat inequality and eliminate poverty.
Per Scalia in District of Columbia v. Heller: “Like most rights, the 2nd Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld...[and] the Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places…or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
Setting the Tone: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that…Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form…." From: “On Liberty”, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVII: Essays on Politics and Society.