Simplified Redistribution Of Wealth

So, how would you feel about the U.S. scrapping our entire welfare system and replacing it with an annual payment of $10,000 to every American citizen of 21 or older? That's the idea being floated in Charles Murray's book, "In Our Hands," as Tim Worstall tells us at TCS Daily.

Here's the gist of it:

The basic plan is so terribly simple. Take all of the money we currently pay out through the tax and benefit system on everything like Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, food stamps (whatever the current name of that program is) student aid, all the programs which take money from one group to give to another, and abolish those programs. Yes, simply do away with them.

Worstall continues:

Instead of sucking all this money into Washington DC and then allowing the Congresscritters to parcel it out to favored constituencies, along with the heavy tithe taken for the bureaucracies, simply hand it out as a $10,000 a year payment to each and every adult citizen.

There would be, no doubt, myriad objections from left and right in response to so radical an idea. This article is the first of a two part series, answering objections to the plan from both. Worstall's first in the set answers some of the anticipated howling from both the right, and the libertarian schools of thought. The objection boils down to a rejection of the redistribution of wealth as an intrinsic part of our social system. Worstall's response is basically that redistribution of wealth is here to stay. We'd better get used to the idea. He instead focuses on the practicalities.

I'll stick with my basic thought that the reason to oppose statism isn't that redistribution is immoral (although it may be, to your taste) it's rather that the actual way it is done is so hopelessly complicated that it manages not to achieve its stated aims. The Plan, to my mind, neatly sidesteps almost all of these problems. Instead of a web of grants, tax breaks, allowances, subsidies for this or that, there is simply one payment to all. It's not enough to live comfortably on, but it will provide for the basics.

Worstall goes through a number of the pros and cons of reducing the redistribution system to such a basic level, but there was one argument I found particularly intriguing. He noted how, in the current welfare system, marriage can actually be a liability. Women raising kids alone get more money from the state, so men who are not very financially productive are in effect a hindrance to prosperity. On the other hand, when both a father and mother are receiving that same ten grand, suddenly both parents are a financial asset, merely by their existence.

The simple advantage of eliminating massive amounts of bloated government bureaucracy makes the simplification scheme an idea to consider, but the notion of government subsidies actually being an encouragement to stable family life, rather than a deterrent, gives added punch to a concept already holding some natural appeal.