A fantasy economy

It's amusing to watch the catfight going on at Larvatus Prodeo about whether it is fair enough or not to say something so obvious to common sense like "ideally, it is better for children to have two parents rather than one."

That's "too sweeping" for Mark Bahnisch, who one suspects has never had children. (I would post that over at LP itself, but because I am questioning motivations and his personal experience of life, I suspect I would be in breach of its "be nice, unless it's conservatives" comments policy.)

Mark's problem is he doesn't like marriage as an institution at all, and (despite the thousands of studies showing the better life outcomes for children with two parents, and the fact that marriages last longer than de facto relationships), to start sounding like you might even be heading towards the suggestion that the old fuddy duddy idea of marriage is generally the best way to raise children is just too conservative in principle to contemplate.

But this comment by Mark really caught my eye:

Btw, personally, I support a guarenteed minimum income and I’m not in the slightest bit troubled by whether people choose to work, or surf, or bring up babies. In a society where the incentives are as strong as they are for most people, most will choose to work. But it doesn’t worry me in the slightest if people don’t, and how they choose to spend their lives.

Well, if anyone can ever find better evidence to show why we don't let sociologists run economies and countries, let me know!

UPDATE: more explanation from a later comment by Mark:

....the proposal is not for the minimal levels of benefits grudgingly payed now and hedged around with nasty conditions (= “responsibilities”) but rather either through direct income transfer or through a negative income tax for a generous level of income to go to all adults in society as of right. Interestingly, there’s more support for this among libertarians than social democrats these days, though it’s a classic social democratic policy - both in providing equality of opportunity with a big kick along and in refusing the notion that work is a good in and of itself and to be valued no matter what its nature.

In fact, because the entire bureaucracy of surveillance and punishment would be abolished, you could probably have lower taxes and still give everyone 20k a year or whatever. Just imagine - no centrelink, no dole diaries, no… this stuff is inordinately expensive.

Colour me skeptical, as maybe the libertarians at Catallaxy think this is a serious idea, but it still sounds very silly to me. It might be able to sold on novelty value to someone like Pauline Hanson, though. I'll email her straight away.