What Travis mentioned is one of the huge hurtles that we would have to pass over to stop the welfare state.  How do you convince people that they don't have the right to free handouts when they have been raised to believe that they do have that right?  More over, how do you convince the speaker Joe met that his ideology is a train ticket to societal bankruptcy?  I doubt that he would take that news very well, being that he is giving speeches on his ideas.

In the war room articles say that we are trying to win men’s minds in a philosophical war.  But how do you fight indoctrination that causes blatant denial of facts?  The only answer to this is one generation at a time in a very slow moving counter campaign of propaganda (use of the word being information meant to sway opinion.) that will remains largely word of mouth today.

I agree that using a private safety net before we can move out of a welfare state would be the ideal transition.  Though we still need to find a way to convince folks that they need to privately take up their egalitarian concerns for the lesser man.  That is, we need to wane a portion of the population off nanny governments bottles and convince them that only they can effectively bring about the change they are looking to bring about.   Convince them that they need to own their egalitarian concerns not push the cost of it off onto others through the government.

 So perhaps?

Step 1:  Find a viable method of privatizing welfare programs that are effective at aiding people get back onto their feet again.

Step 2:  Convince a portion of society that if their wanting to help people can be achieved more effectively through our private method.

Step 3:  Stop the government welfare programs and replace them with private ones.

            Only through offering people a better idea can we hope to get them to abandon their current ideas.  But we are also required to show them how much better the new idea is as well.  We are effectively selling one idea over the other.  It is important that we do it this way instead of simply being anti-welfare.  We are not people of anti-thoughts.

Sorry for the rant.  Travis just sparked some ideas.

Thanks,

 
Eric.

Greg,

            I think a completely privatized world with no bankruptcy proceedings might work.  It would require that a little more work go into the contract end of lending and barrowing.  Banks and lenders would be by contrast extremely prejudice about where their money goes under that system.  They are rather lending happy today because if you go bankrupt they can write off their losses on their taxes.  In a system with no taxes, there would be no write offs.  SO there would be a few choices for the banker to make.

1.)    Run you dry for every single penny you have and then continue to bleed you until they are paid back in full or you die.  (This method would not yield the most money for a banker.)

2.)    Refinance your load and give you more time to pay.  (This would yield more money in the long run than #1 but people might continuously want to refinance until their death resulting in a large loss for the banker in the long run.)

There might be other options but I can't think of any right now.

So it would be up to the banker to come up with a balance between one and two to minimize their losses.  It would be in the interest of the barrower to have provisions for the event of bankruptcy built into their lending contracts to ensure the banker couldn’t contractually enslave him or bleed him dry forever.  But in the end lending and barrowing is risk-taking; sometimes we just have to sit with the loss of failure.  The only way to have a working non-bankruptcy system is to have responsible lenders and barrowers.

Eric.