 Yes ma'am. Dr. Friedman, you mentioned that 80% of the people in the country are covered by private insurance plans. I'm curious as to what your proposal would be to cover those who presently are not covered and those who truly cannot afford at this point because they are below the so-called poverty level, they are not an organized labor, they are not a member of a large corporation which provides such a plan for its employees. I said before I do not believe you ought to have any special program for medicine at all. I believe I have long been in favor of substituting for our present whole set of welfare arrangements a comprehensive negative income tax which would provide to individuals below a level a sum of money which would assure that they would be able to maintain a particular level. There is no reason why part of that sum of money cannot be spent on the purchase of the same kind of medical insurance everybody else said. I have long been opposed and I think you should be opposed to giving special sums of money for people for housing and another sum for food and another sum for clothing and another sum for medical care. We ought to give people the problem of poverty is money and we ought to have a program under which we assure a minimum level of income of spending and then let people spend it the way they want. The idea of a universal basic income has been circulating in prosperous capitalist countries since around the 1930s or perhaps before and at the time of this video's release has undergone a perceived renaissance from potential political candidates. The abbreviation as UBI is synonymous with Andrew Yang in the United States and the Liberal Democrat Party in the United Kingdom. We see it in America right now under a Republican presidency in the COVID relief measures with qualifying citizens receiving a check of $1,200. UBI is a system of welfare that is designed to subsidize the income of people below a certain threshold either by issuing a fixed amount like giving the working class a $1,000 check every month or if the decided monthly income is $3,000 and somebody earns $2,500 to subsidize them the whole remaining $500. What is incredible about this system is that it makes absolutely no sense at all. Dumping $1,000 checks on millions of people at once does not create any additional wealth because scarce goods do not become any less scarce because of this new money. If in the month of January there is no massive boom in housing construction then in month February UBI is implemented there is no new supply of houses to match the increased demand from consumers because of this new money. Basic economics tells us that an increase in demand with no increase in supply can drive up the price of a good exponentially in a bidding war so all you achieve is raising the cost of living for poor people by $1,000. Then if you subsidize income below a fixed threshold to make up for it what you have created is a 100% tax rate on any additional money that you earn. Let's say a single mother earns $1,000 per month and receives a $2,000 check to compensate then if she receives a pay rise of $100 her UBI payment will be cut by $100 to match and now it is literally impossible for her to progress and improve the lot of her family through work. They are both absolutely fallacious ideas that achieve at best a prescribed jump in price inflation and at worst greatly exacerbates the poverty trap that is the welfare state. UBI is also proposed not as a replacement for anything only as an added expense to pile on top of the already monolithic beast of the parasitic administrative bureaucracy behind all of our current welfare schemes. So why am I doing this talking to you in a video about the negative income tax. Negative income tax is a proposal for a financial safety net in the form of money payments just like UBI but is not only immensely superior to UBI it is also immensely superior to the entire practice of welfare as we currently know it and I firmly believe it should be the de facto idea of libertarian welfare. The word libertarian implies an exceptional emphasis on economics and efficiency this whole idea was pioneered by the very own Milton Friedman a man who embodied that very notion and was hardly a communist so if he is proposing this as a viable replacement to welfare that should at the very least warrant that people listen to it. It's a proposal to replace the entire welfare state that means replace food stamps replace public health care replace universal credit and every other form you can think of as well as abolishing the minimum wage. The simple premise and calculation goes as follows. An ideal level of income is decided for the sake of this example we will use 30,000 pounds which is the approximate median average yearly income in Britain according to the office for national statistics. Any level of income below that ideal level is subsidized to 40% of the remaining amount so somebody who earns $10,000 has a gap of 20,000 to the median income and will be subsidized 40% of that 20,000 gap which is 8,000. So what was an income of 10,000 pounds before is now 18,000 pounds what was before an income too low to live and afford basic amenities like housing costs health insurance and so on is now far easier to do so. A person who works full-time but is so unskilled that their income is $5,000 is then subsidized with 10,000 bringing their total income up to 15. What this achieves when put into effect is the goal of UBI of providing all full-time workers with a livable wage but also without the massive negative effect which is removing the incentive to work harder and seek a pay rise because when your subsidies are reduced as your earned wage increases you still take home more money overall. Because your income is entirely determined around how much you can earn directly from the market the issue of demand side inflation is massively mitigated compared to UBI and to a better degree than most welfare benefits even now currently create. It is an undeniable fact for instance that private health care is of better quality than public health care so instead of throwing billions of pounds at the NHS which by the way of its own structure is an incredibly inefficient money pit why on earth should we not give that money directly to the people who use it so that every worker has the ability to afford private health care of their own choosing rather than be forced to use an inferior and more costly service. When you replace all of public expenditure with public money you entirely eliminate the need for any government run industry which will only ever run at a loss compared to private industry and I can stop any criticism of private health care here that uses the health care industry of the United States as an example by showing you two charts. The first is the level of expenditure into the health care industry by country which you will see that the US actually spends more tax money per person than the UK. That certainly does not sound privatised to me. And then we have the average price of a pharmaceutical drug per country. The US is far and above the highest and spikes massively during the administrations of Obama and Clinton as their moves to increase government involvement in health care only created corruption and has allowed pharmaceutical companies to run riot with their patents for drugs allowing a government backed monopoly. That is not at all characteristic of a privatised system and certainly not one that would be implemented alongside NIT. So on that note back to NIT. The figures are used before were only examples and the level of ideal income and the percentage of remainder subsidisation can be debated to determine what the most efficient levels are. A crucial requirement for this which UBI proponents ignore is the requirement of full time work in order to receive the subsidies or else you have the same problem as before of incentivising not working. As it is a replacement for all welfare we have to ask if people with disabilities should qualify for subsidy. One initial point of note is that not all disabilities prohibits the possibility of work like this incredible story of a man with Down syndrome who worked at McDonald's for 32 years. If this man received NIT subsidies then he would very likely not need any more assistance in order to provide himself with the care that his disability requires. But I for one believe that if this system was implemented then it is an absolute must that people with work prohibiting disabilities receive a subsidy so on an income of zero they would receive 40% of the entire remaining 30,000 which would be 12,000 pounds per year. If this is not enough to meet their needs I see absolutely no reason why private charity would not suffice as it already does let alone with the huge increase of disposable income across the board the NIT could release into the economy. What I find most remarkable about the proposal of a negative income tax is that it is incredibly hard to argue with especially as just a replacement to the current welfare state. I believe it's total superiority and that cannot be denied. But it seems to me that the only way to refute the concept as a whole requires you to be an extreme socialist or an extreme capitalist. An extreme socialist will throw up their arms at the fact that if it's not public ownership of the means of production it's just not good enough and that any sort of income class hierarchy is evil. I don't concern myself with these criticisms because every aspect of socialism is wrong so I won't even go there in this video. But what I can understand and discuss is the other side. The first ultra-capitalist or libertarian critique that you can make is that taxation is theft. And of course I agree I am an Ancap after all but it's worth remembering the drastically different outcome that this taxation would have rather than mostly just lining the pockets of bureaucrats as the areas of their jurisdiction fall into ruin like we currently see. This in fact sees taxation actually fulfil its supposed purpose of benefiting the public. I do propose NIT as the end goal of an ideal society to say that we should reach this system and that is perfect we should never leave. The end goal I want is the same as you. An entirely privatised society free from a monopoly of violence in which private charity can replace any kind of public social safety net. What you have to bear in mind is that this proposal would be a godsend for us compared to the current mess of a system and is able to demonstrate to our dissenters that in fact there is a libertarian system which can provide for those in need with a level of certainty that a dissenter would require in order to come on board with our whole idea of individual liberty. It is simply a matter of applying pragmatism and understanding our audience in order to achieve a society far closer to our ideal than the one we have now and in my opinion this is undoubtedly the best way to achieve it. There was a time when I thought that a minicus state with voluntary taxation was the ideal society and during that time I came up with the idea of the NIT standing for Voluntary Negative Income Tax. In this way NIT would not actually be a tax but would be a contract. If you earn below the median income and want to be subsidised you must sign a contract stating that once you earn above the median you agree to pay a progressive income tax for as long as you work. This makes the undertaking a calculated choice. Do you want to earn more now at the cost of being taxed later or just make do with your income now in order to keep more of your income later? In this system you can of course accept donations from private individuals to supplement the tax revenue of the higher earners who signed up for it with a lottery system and organised fundraising events just as charities currently do. That is certainly worth further thought and exploration. And I'll wrap this up by saying that it's for this reason of pragmatism that I felt the need to make this video now explaining NIT before I go on to making a video I have in mind showing that our current welfare system is nothing more than a trap designed to keep people in relative poverty and rely on our government handouts therefore giving the government a desperate and reliable voter base who could not survive without them and their breadcrumbs. It made no sense to me to undertake this before I proposed a better alternative as without it I would fall into a problem that lots of libertarians do which is decrying a system with good reason but being cast aside for not presenting a reasonable alternative. In that objective I'd go as far to say that NIT is flawless and I hope you will all agree on that much. Take it easy.