Seems to be a pretty obvious social program to me.

Just so you know, in addition to crazy working hours, unhealthy workplaces, and just general abuse, the minimum wage in places like Indonesia is not enough to keep most families (even with two breadwinners) from malnourishment.

Sorry I’m bringing politics into your blog about entrepernuership, but in all fairness you started :)

Like… roads, clean water, electricity, health research (half of which is funded by the NIH, the more important half), small farm and small business loans, environmental, energy, and work and product safety standards, or just the social safety net programs like social security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, medicare and medicaid that have saved tens of millions of lives and made most of our lives far more worth the living?

I agree that social security might be better funded by direct taxes on extreme concentrations of wealth or on negative practices like resource waste, destabilizing and unproductive speculation, criminal activity, etc. But part of the reason social security was made the way it is was so that it would be more difficult to change, since everyone felt they had “earned” it.

PS – Milton Friedman supported a “minimum income” credit that would give every person money just for being alive. Don’t know if you knew about that, very few devotees of the ideology known as “mainstream economics” seem to be aware of that fact.