On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 01:17:25PM +0200, Jacob W Braestrup wrote: > The big "problem" is that parents have no right over the future income > of their children. Hence they cannot make the contract. Neither can the > children themselves until they reach (legal) maturity.
I recently saw a proposal to let children borrow against their own future incomes without the ability to make binding contracts. The idea is that they will want to pay back the loan voluntarily to avoid getting bad credit ratings. It would be interesting to see if the economics really works out. Here's the relevant part from the original message by Phil Osborn archived at http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians/1628.html: --- No one can legally bind a kid to such a contract. However, having a viable personal trust with highly valued shares would be a huge asset - much more so if it caught on large scale - in getting further capitalization to start a business, for example. A kid could revoke his trust, but, barring unusual circumstances such as criminally negligant trustees, for example, he could expect to pay a high price in terms of lost opportunities to acquire capitalization. Few people would feel very generous toward someone who had simply welched on the people who had invested their hard-earned dollars in raising him or her, and there would be public records that would follow such a person. Because part of the Trust shares allocations would probably go to reimburse the parents for their efforts on the kid's behalf, they would have a natural interest in doing the best parenting job possible. (In fact, one of the possibilities on which I have speculated is a currency based on mutual shares in such trusts.)
