Is that the only way someone can contribute to society by paying taxes? It would seem odd in that case that the UK has been encouraging nurses from all over the world to come and work in the UK health system, as they do not contribute a huge amount in taxes.

Indeed, a top UK soccer player apparently earns more in a week that a nurse will in 5 years. But which do you think would affect society more – the loss of all the nurses, or all the football players?

I would be fascinated if anyone could point to any research that shows a positive correlation between an individual’s level of earnings and their contribution to the business or country.

In the UK for a number of years much has been made by the government that what people really want is choice in public services. Apparently, people don’t want to go their local hospital, they want to go to the best hospital. They don’t want to send their kids to the local comp (comprehensive school), they want to get them in to the inner city academy a few miles away.

This is quite clearly nonsense – what people really want is for their local hospital, school or whatever to be up to scratch so they don’t have to bother finding out where a better alternative is and then spend half their lives (in the case of schools) ferrying kids to and from.

Furthermore, it is impossible for everyone to send their children to the school of their choice – everyone wants to go to the ‘best’ school, which, obviously, has limited places. The majority, therefore do not get their first choice – the idea of choice is an illusion.

The system in the UK gives priority (justifiably – given concerns about inner city transport etc. etc.) to children who live within the catchment area of the school. Only a smallish proportion of places are allocated for those living outside the catchment. This has the inevitable effect of driving up property prices within the catchment of ‘good’ schools – thereby self-selecting middle class children for the good schools and leaving poorer families (whose children typically do less well at school in any case) to attend the schools which no one wants to go to. Which in turns makes their results bad and their place in the league tables drop which means that no one wants to go there . . . . .

Meanwhile the good schools get all the support one expects from having a bunch of middle-class wealthy families involved (including many parents paying for additional private tuition) which means their results get better, competition for places gets more intense (it has been known for families to suddenly become Christian, if the good school is a church-based institution) and so it all starts again.

Merely allowing people to chose schools does nothing to improve the bad ones.

I agree with your principle overall, but I disagree with your specific example. The US government created special and elaborate regulations to ensure that Radiologists would be insulated from foreign competition, while it created special visas to ensure that US Corps would be able to hire PHP programmers from overseas.

Consequently any US citizen moving elsewhere will still have to pay. The only way to avoid it is to renounce your US citizenship which also means you will never be allowed back in the country and you will have to get citizenship of another country.

At least two inter-dependent changes are required:

1) Create structural feedback mechanisms that hold government entities accountable for their performance. This is relatively straightforward for some organizations (e.g. schools as mentioned in your plan) but is more difficult for others (e.g. police and prisons).

2) Enable government entities to easily discipline and fire poor performing managers and employees without bringing back the political cronyism that preceded the civil service era. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of anyone with a clear proven idea on how to do this. Perhaps senior managers could be selected and fired by civil servants while being empowered to discipline and fire those same civil servants.

The Democratic solution (raise taxes and spending to maintain a decent level of service) and Republican solution (cut taxes and borrow the funds needed to maintain a decent level of service) are both unsustainable. You identify some areas where cutting the level of service is appropriate. Real solutions in other areas will require much more than simply getting rid of unions.

Obviously you are not much of a free marketer

How’s this for an alternative explanation of the health care industry’s problems.

1) Health care is taxed
2) To avoid taxes, companies buy their employees pretax health care plans, effectively 50% cheaper
3) The employee gets sick, and goes to the doctor
4) The doctor says “you may have chronic ecphalneurinitinitinis! I’d say its only about a 1% chance, but you should have a 5000$ test to make sure”
5) Employee: “What’s my copay?”
6) Doctor: 5$

IMO the real problem with health care is that the free market is NOT brought to bear, because of the stupid HMOs. If people had to pay for their health care on a day to day basis, they would think twice before going in for some 200$ doctor visit. And, suddenly health care institutions would have to actually compete on price. Do you know that most of the time it is not even possible to ask a doctor what the price is for a certain operation? They take it for granted that you don’t care.

So, to fix the problem all we have to do is make all healthcare tax free, at which point the HMOs and their bureaucratic waste will disappear, the health care industry, forced to compete on price, will become 2x cheaper, and 80% of the wasted services will go away. Problem solved.

Chris #2: I have to admit that I spent the last 7 years waiting for massive inflation. With interest rates so low and government spending so high, it seemed inevitable. But I guess it is time to admit that I was wrong. Labor costs are a big driver of prices in the U.S. and with millions of Americans losing their jobs it would seem that labor costs are going to fall.

Chris: Is it all right if another country drains away our best people? What’s the alternative? Soviet-style exit visa controls? If a young well-educated American decides that he or she would prefer to emigrate and skip out on paying for trillions in bond and pension obligations incurred by his parents and grandparents, I don’t think it would be fair to chain the young citizen to his or her desk for the next 50 years so that we can extract taxes. I would not expect an African-style brain drain, but something like what happened to England after World War II seems possible (a lot of young English citizens emigrated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa rather than help pick up the pieces and pay the debt incurred while fighting the Germans).