The rich need hugs too. Plus, ancient machines!

Paul, just to re-iterate, I agree: Pell Grants and the Marshall Plan are fantastic, successful programs.

However, they're both short-term projects with specific goals and spending targets. Quite different from "here's $24,000 a year for life for being American".

(Also, while I don't know much about how much reconstruction funding is going to Iraq and Afganistan, I know that Pell Grant funding has been cut, and funding levels have been capped for quite a while now, regardless of inflation. I think pumping more $$ into this kind of program is a better plan than the Friedman-Godfrey Plan.)

I think it's important that Friedman himself balked at his own suggestion, when it was proposed to congress. He would support his own idea, only if there was also a radical restructuring- a nullification, I think- of the existing welfare system.

Thus *his* idea, which we may or may not be arguing about here, was NOT that everyone should just get some cash. His idea, I think, was that the current welfare system should be replaced with something much simpler. In other words, he was proposing some sort of welfare reform, nothing more, nothing less.

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Payscales for CEOs mainly reflect responsibility. If you're on the board of a company worth billions of dollars, you want only the best at the helm. So paychecks get high. I think it's more gross that big-league sports stars and actors get paid even more for their dog-and-pony dance routines.

But I support having a class of people who are obscenely rich. Why? Because big projects take big money, and the world's ills require big projects to solve. Manhattan, Apollo project-size in scope. And the very very rich have a long tradition of multi-million dollar philanthropy. Howard Hughes, Bill Gates, and Rockefeller, for example. One of the main reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing today is because Howard Hughes was so rich, that he gave lots of money to make a private medical research funding organization. By all accounts I've heard, the Gates Foundation is a top-notch charity. Mainly because one guy got so rich he could actually afford to help, not the hobo outside the liquor store, but fuckin' Africa.

Governments, it's turning out, might not be the best sources for funding large social projects like this. Look at the stem cell debacle- the states are having to make their own mini-NIHs just to fund stem cell research, which is a fantastic idea. Or at least, a fantastic work-around.

I think that Steve's exactly right: adding new legislation will create a ton of new lawsuits and people who can successfully 'game' the system. That's how some stockbrokers, accountants, and lawyers do so well- they game the system, exploiting loopholes
(because in the absolute limit, no system can be consistent and complete).

It's easy to imagine that, despite salary caps, people could have more than one job. Or hire friends and family to pick up extra paychecks. Or just receive lots of great expensive 'gifts'. You're going to pass laws on all this stuff? Based on what moral or ethical principles, exactly?

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We've talked at each other for a while now, and it looks like most of us are running out of steam. I know I am.

EDIT: Eh, I had some stuff here that came off kind of bitchy. Deleted. 'Sall good.
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Normally I say that I'd never want to work on anything different than what I do. But there's a report in this week's Nature on the function of the most ancient mechanical computer, the Antikythera Device. Whoa.

You can see I've got an ancient tech/automata fetish from the game, right? Wish I knew more about the history of ancient automata from pre-Jesus times up to Versailles. Anyone have reading suggestions, please offer.

You can read about it in Nature, or the NY Times, or Wikipedia, or you could just go to Metafilter and browse all three:
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/56596

Metafilter provided me with this gem, which is a great example of bizarre tech:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/11/dog_power.html

(There's probably some connection here with all the progressive labor law discussion going on too, I guess.)