Milton Friedman, my favourite libertarian, advocated for a negative income tax as the best form of social safety net. It means that the minimum amount of money any person gets is not zero!
He also liked to point out that a lot of other government programs were in fact regressive: paid for in taxes by working class people and providing the benefit to middle class and up. A classic example of that is funding for higher education. It’s pretty darn regressive to pay for higher education with taxes collected from working class people whose children don’t even attend higher education!
He has a lot of other arguments that make a ton of sense. He is against any and all forms of subsidies for large businesses and he is against laws which create and protect monopolies and oligopolies.
The one thing I’m not clear on is how to organize society to protect against future government interference and especially corruption by special interests.
You need solid anticorruption laws the same way you need solid antitrust laws and they need to be liberally enforced. The problem is that neither have been since the 70’s. Regulatory capture by big business is a massive problem, and I am not sure if it is possible to 100% defend against.
I self identify libertarian but lean left. I’d argue that while things like funding higher education may currently be regressive, if free education extended from the current cap of 12th grade to encompass at least an associates level degree you would have a lot more lower and working class taking advantage of it and making it less regressive. With the country having jettisoned it’s manufacturing and blue collar industry, I would further argue this is necessary for the country to compete on the international stage.
Germany has government funded education throughout. It’s still regressive! They stream people into either working class tracks (hauptschule and realschule) or academic (gymnasium). In effect, this means working class students have far less opportunity to go to university in Germany than they do in the US, despite the latter’s problems with affordability.
Friedman would go 100% the other way and abolish public schools entirely, along with abolishing the minimum wage, subsidies for universities, subsidies for business, and tariffs. His argument is that the minimum wage puts a floor on the productivity of a worker which means many people who could be hired at a lower wage and be trained on the job instead do not get hired at all and have to pay for their own training through school (either directly with tuition or indirectly through taxes).
The current system ends up creating large classes of people who get an education in subject matter that’s totally irrelevant to their career (like someone studying sociology in order to work in HR). Why should we, as taxpayers, be paying for this? Employers should be paying to train their own workers on the job!
