That thinking is total and utter BULLSHIT! As long as the cash flow works contingent liabilities ARE NOT AN ISSUE. If you count contingent liabiliites, you must also count contingent assets – which would amount to about 10% of the expected national income over the same period.

You also really missed my point. If Social Security were entirely recapitalized as either an employee-ownership scheme or the kind of stock ownership scheme that occurs only in Michael Tanner’s wet dreams, Nanna’s nursing home care would still come out of somebody’s current spending – because if the system were totally capitalized Nanna would hold enough stock – or be the member of an annuity fund which held enough stock – to pay for her care. The dividends or gains from that stock are funded from the REVENUE of those firms in either Nanna’s portfolio or the portfolio of the entire annuity fund.

In other words, on a CASH FLOW BASIS, if you buy stuff, part of the purchase price eventually makes it into Nanna’s nursing home bill.

Even if you don’t fully capitalize Nanna, you will simply shift the responsibility of paying for care to Nanna’s kids. Nanna’s kids are likely working at jobs – and on the whole something that you buy will eventually produce revenue that will go to Nanna’s kids or grandkids – which will eventually go to Nanna’s nursing home bill.

In other words, at some point, unless you never spend any money – you will be funding Nanna’s nursing home bill.

Shooting bureaucrats won’t stop your costs. Shooting Nanna might – except that eventually when you get old that is an invitation for someone to shoot you.

If it came to that choice, most in society would shoot the libertarians rather than shooting the old people or the bureaucrats.

A good transition plan is not tinkering around the edges, it is making sure that everything gets done so that the state does not do it.

It is incorrect to claim that the 18 large is paying for Nanna to be housed in a nursing home – the transfers to government have NOTHING to do with intergenerational transfers except for SocSec, which is runnign a mounting deficit anyhow (in other words, the tab for the aged parents is a shit-load more than 18 large).

The ‘18 large’ (per capita) does not incldue off-budget items, and nor does it include any accounting for the present value of future liabilities which are at present unfunded.

This is why I turn – harshly – on any grey-hair that blathers on about how ‘they paid taxes their whole working lives’. That may be so, but for their whole working lives the government debt was accumulating (even during the so-called ‘Clinton Surplus’ years, debt ROSE). This indicates that, on nett, the system was in deficit (and as such the representative grey-hair spent their entire life putting government services onto the tab of future generations).

The average idiot thinks that government has a magic pudding – that if government rigs its accounts in such a way that they say they are running a surplus, augmentations to aggregate government debt can somehow be ignored. Well they fucking well CAN’T. New debt indicates that government received less than it paid out.

It s about time that people realised that government can move water from one end of the bath to another (with slippage), or from one day’s bath to another day’s bath (with slippage), but whether they are doing instantaneous or intertemporal substitution, the net effect is always and everywhere, a shallower bath.

Caedite Eos. it is the only way.

Cheerio

GT

Now, lets say the government went away – say after electing me President. When this happens the transfers between generations don’t stop and they don’t become totally anarchic either. You can’t just declare freedom – instead you must replace programs with alternate modalities, such as the employee-ownership of either company stock or of an index fund of employee-owned firms. Instead of writing a quarterly check to SSA, the employer will do a quarterly stock issuance or buy. Either way, the impact of this will be reflected in the price of the product.

Paying for the education of our youth will always be a cost. This transfer to parents for their children’s education will either come via a direct subsidy from the employee-owned firm or other employer or from a land value tax (although the economic justification for making landholders pay for the education of children escapes me as much as using property taxes does). If the employer pays there are a few options – company schools and daycares, direct transfers to parents who then pay tuition at either a secular or religious school, or a donation by the employer to the school system (public or private) of the employee’s choice (all employee owners in a move that respects donor sovereignty) with parents signing their kids up to the system they chose and inter-system adjustment to balance things out at the margins.

Transportation fees are actually the closest thing we have to pay for play government, since theoretically gas taxes pay for roads, with automated gas pumps collecting the tax (except in New Jersey). Toll roads supplement this, but eventually an automated road system will both provide electricity to power cars, control and payment of the electricity and road system. This system may or may not be governmental – but it won’t be free.

If you want to get rid of defense spending, the best way is to encourage union ownership of multinational corporations and the extension of union benefits to the overseas employees. This will build middle class democracies the world over faster than anything else and eliminate the need for anyone to have a standing army or military force – aside from a coast guard to hang pirates (although the need for that diminishes if poor people have options). Space exploration and colonization are paid for by tourists, scientific endowments and colonists themselves. If anti-gravity propulsion is invented there should be a boom in this area – which means the hasty exit of government aerospace.

There are a few other smaller government services I haven’t covered, but I think you get the idea of how they can be covered. Note that most governmental services don’t go away, they are just paid for more directly or through non-governmental means. Except for stopping the massive waste on defense spending, most other services will still be built into your personal bottom line.

Actually, there’s more to the compulsion than that. The taxes themselves create “public debts” in terms of that same money. Even without legal tender laws, that would be sufficient to create a demand for it on the part of the public. Indeed, just precisely that was done in colonial situations. The trick there was to allow taxes to be paid in cash or kind (including labour, e.g. on roads) that paid a small amount in cash to get the cash into circulation without making paying with labour preferable to paying in cash.