A potentially great improvement to minimum wage laws to handle both economic efficiency as well as poverty concerns

A 50% marginal tax rate would be a dramatic improvement on existing programs; at present, it is not uncommon for getting a job to reduce the net income of someone previously depending on government assistance. And yet most people try very hard to get off government assistance as soon as they can (don't tell me about your worthless cousin who hasn't worked in their adult life; I have one of those, too. But the statistics show them to be much rarer than they appear). The problem with this program isn't that there's a bunch of lazy poor people who would choose not to work and take the smaller income, the problem is that our political system is in the grip of vicious stereotypes about lazy poor people that make it impossible for any program like this to gain widespread support, because of irrational fears that it will end up rewarding lazy poor people.

A basic income is, of course, an alternative which would eliminate the 50% marginal tax rate problem. It would obviously be more expensive, if you wished people with no other income to be at the same level as on your proposal, but if we're floating crazy utopian schemes, a wealth tax would be a very promising way to raise quite a lot of additional revenue while having some beneficial incentives. It would encourage wealthy people to sell non-productive or insufficiently productive assets to those who would get more use from them, instead of hoarding them out of laziness or tradition; while there are not a lot of rural aristocrats inefficiently farming vast estates because they like being local lords these days, there do seem to be modern phenomena with some similar features to Adam Smith's favorite example of massive, widespread inefficiency.

The original formulation of "Politics is the mind killer", intuitively seems not as good as yours here. It seems that there are probably other mind-killers.

Can we think of specific one's that aren't well described as "politics" and have a mind-killing effect of a commensurate order of magnitude?

Is "mind-killing" somehow a better description of what politics does than, say, beginning deliberation by writing one's bottom line first?

My bad. Friedman's NIT implementation seems to be the exact same thing I wrote. NIT seems like a really lousy name for it though, given that it naturally lends itself to the interpretation in my previous comment ; as a fixed percentage bonus added to your salary by the government within some wage band.

For what it's worth, I didn't find lessdazed's comment harder to parse or "worse" than yours. Plus, it was shorter!

bouncing around as variables in your mind

I communicated my thoughts poorly.

Your preferred method of writing and talking

The reason why this kind of writing is sub-optimal is the following...It is not necessary to get verbose and guard yourself against any possibly misinterpretation in the world...this approach is extremely sub-optimal for communication.

To some extent, I assumed you wrote it as you thought it, considering how the other things were variables and just as a general sense I had. The sign that it's not abstract and that you are likely not holding off on proposing solutions is in how one thinks about it regardless of how one ultimately writes it.

I'm not primarily arguing that writing abstractly is always optimal (it admittedly may not have been here), but that thinking concretised is suboptimal, and writing concretised is correlated with concretized thinking. It's like Solomon's Problem.

So I have no large beef with how you wrote it, and I think you wrote the idea you had in a more than adequate way, but I and many others see it as not on topic. I think that that is because it is too specific. If this (ideal?) way of writing was a reflection of your thoughts, that should have been a hint that the thoughts weren't general enough.

My judgement is very susceptible to being wrong insofar as you may have thought about it totally abstractly and been good at avoiding too abstract writing; perhaps you have the good habit of translating the general thoughts in your mind into exemplary exemplary (sic) words, in which case you wouldn't have had this specific hint that this post was fairly off topic by its narrowness.

Again, I wasn't proposing a final solution that should be implemented tomorrow!

This confused me for a while. In my opinion, it is more specific ideas that are better prepared to be implemented, i.e. the applications of more general forms. I hadn't expected as a defense against a charge of being too practical and not theoretical enough an emphasis of the distance between the idea and its implementation. In general, one isn't concerned with perfection in the initial presentation of any idea, that makes sense, and one brings up the distance from implementation to show critics (that's me) are nitpicking (me?) and misguided (could be me) when they treat a floated idea inappropriately by subjecting it to a standard suited for smoothing a refined idea by removing the tiniest flaws.

As in this particular instance, I was arguing for generality as against practicality, I was truly confused when you spoke to the idea of differing standards being appropriate at different stages of an idea's life by using the language of distance to implementation. Eventually, I got it ;)

I have no idea what you are saying here :)

And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence.

All data? That would amaze me if true.

And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.

All the data shows that communist countries were as good at producing carboard imitations of cars, as capitalist countries were at producing actual cars.

When I visited Cuba in 1992, it looked like nothing had been replaced, built, repaired, painted, or maintained, since the 1950s. There was this big corral of ancient farm equipment.

And all data says that communist countries were economically just as successful as non-communist countries on average in terms of growth and convergence. I even linked to data showing exactly that.

I'd be really curious to see these data, if you don't mind posting these links again.

However, I will be very disappointed if these data boil down to measures of economic growth based on "real" GDP statistics, for at least two good reasons. First, the official communist statistics are known to have been doctored to an extreme degree. (Occasionally, as in e.g. the 1937 Soviet census, people who dared to submit truthful but bad-looking statistics were denounced as wreckers and shot. Admittedly, the repression after Stalin was much milder, but it's still naive to think that numbers weren't fudged or even faked outright at every level.) Second, for obvious reasons, meaningful comparisons of purchasing power between planned and market economies are impossible, and any attempt to do so is likely to favor the former.

Then the data were wrong. Sorry, enormous net exodous rates trump Goodharted metrics. When you use a metric, you have to know the extent of its applicability. When "high growth" coincides with people risking death to get the hell out, you don't say, wow what amazing growth!