Answer to 1) : yes

Answer to 2) : no

The problem is that your second question is a loaded one, because your phrase “individuals who have done nothing to earn the money…” indicates an unstated assumption that only the people who have performed the physical labor of extracting the oil and gas (i.e. the oil companies) have “earned” that money.

In fact, the basis of the State receiving income for the Permanent Fund is the basis of ownership, not labor.

My understanding is that the State of Alaska (or perhaps the Federal government) owns the land and have leased exploration and development rights to these oil and gas deposits. We’re talking about what is called passive income, in that the owner of the land does not do anything in terms of physical labor to extract the commodity – that’s up to the lesee – but is able to sit back and collect money anyway from the lesee.

The justification is that extraction of a depletable resource such as oil, etc. deceases the value to the owner of the land (or more accurately the value of the mineral rights, which in turn affects the value of the propery) because there is less amonunt of these resources remaining. Secondarily, there are other losses that the owner suffers because of the lesee’s presence and activities on his land, which are reasonable to expect compensation for.

So yes, the State is collecting royalties, which are earned on the basis of ownership, not labor. And having collected these revenues, it is not unreasonable to distribute at least some portion to its citizens. The citizens have no less right to that revenue as does the state, since the citizens collectively in fact own this land – government’s ownership claim is a delegated ownership right granted to it from the citizenry.

Our system of government is predicated on the fact the government ultimately is subordinate to the people and not is an independent entity with inherent ownership rights to ANYTHING.

Thus the only way you could attack the right of the Alaska citizens to receive these dividends is to take the hoary Marxist position of denying private property rights and claiming that only those doing the labor have full claim over the product, which translates to your claiming that the oil companies have squatter’s rights over the oil.

Is this your argument, or are you just playing games?

2) Do the recipients of the money disbursed from the Alaska Permanent Fund include individuals who have done nothing to earn the money used to create the Alaska Permanent Fund?

Government owns and operates schools.

Should this be abolished?

I am seriously asking…

“The guilty party has his choice; death by electrocution, death by gas, death by phaser, death by hanging–”

Ironically, both socialism and objectivism begin with the same flawed view of human nature: that humans and human society are perfectible if you just create the correct environment.

What they diametrically differ on are the political means to that end.

In brief, socialists define an utilitarian calculus of the “good of the whole” and subsume to that the value of life and of the individual, leading them (with good intentions initially) to employ the coercive power of the State (or of groups) to impose their utopia. Of course, this rapidly turns into tyranny and eventually mass murder as those individuals who resist must be terminated for the socialists’ “good of the whole”.

Objectivists, on the other hand, exalt the individual as a god accountable only to itself, and against all history posit that if you remove all external constraint, that somehow a univeral system of rational self-interest will magically emerge from the thoughts and beliefs of these billions of individuals (rooted in myriad cultures and economic status and eduation and relationships) that all will agree to and abide by. This ignores the impact of all the emotions and intangibles that make us fully human, that don’t obey the laws of rational self-interest.

Both run aground on the rocks of the fundamental truth of human depravity, recognition of which ironically offers the best starting point for actually creating a better human society in practice than either of the above two philosophies can offer. I’m referring to the reality of the Christian God and the guidance of Scripture, recognizing the highly flawed history that these in practice has wrought when applied to the political realm.

On the other hand, recognition of depravity innoculates us against secular utopias and the temptation to utilize coercive state actions out of a healthy respect for “first do no harm” and recognition of the corrupting influence of power and the dehumanizing propensities of bureaucracy.

To that end, I find that limited government, based upon the rule of law and private property rights, offers the most just framework for imperfect humans to govern themselves.