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Because the children have no control over who their parents are, and we shouldn't punish with a lifetime of diminished opportunities because their parents aren'

Because the children have no control over who their parents are, and we shouldn't punish with a lifetime of diminished opportunities because their parents aren't as "good" as others.

Jabanga 9y ago
But we're not punishing them. We're simply not taking, by force, money from one person, to spend it raising the children of another. If we force people to subsidize other people's poor children, we create perverse incentives to have a maximum number of children with minimum personal investment in each. It cannot end well for society.
- nailer 9y ago
  We force people to pay for roads, firefighters, police, healthcare and ensure all children have the same opportunity. Healthy adults can stand for themselves, children and the ill need protection.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    But that's not a justification. That's just telling me we do this a lot.
    - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
      Look, if you want to drag out the old "taxation is theft" chestnut, I'm going to drag out the "property is theft" chestnut, and everyone else can drag out their old chestnuts, and we can totally derail the thread. Do you want to derail the thread just to vomit out slogans we've all heard a thousand times and found wanting?
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        I don't think that's very constructive. The parent comment said [X] should be the rallying cry. I said in my opinion it shouldn't, and I gave my rationale. By all means bring out your chestnuts. I welcome a rigorous discussion, instead of blind conformity to mainstream political mores.
        eli_gottlieb 9y ago
        No, you don't welcome a rigorous discussion. You want to repeat discussions we've already had, in which you were not persuaded to others' points of view, and you didn't persuade them either. The likelihood that we'll all see the divine light of von Mises and convert this time is extraordinarily low. Stop trying.
        Jabanga 9y ago
        I'm expressing my views. It's not constructive to tell people with minority viewpoints to stop expressing them. I did nothing more than what the parent comment did. I also don't think we're in a position to judge the full impact of our words on others, so I don't accept your assessment that no minds were changed by the previous discussions.
        eli_gottlieb 9y ago
        > I'm expressing my views. It's not constructive to tell people with minority viewpoints to stop expressing them. Nobody's telling you not to express your view. The obnoxious thing is to snidely pretend everyone else has to justify their own positions in terms of your view. If you want to say, "taxation is theft", just say it, instead of dragging things out from, "Well why should children have equal opportunities to other children anyways?"
        Jabanga 9y ago
        My position is not that "taxation is theft" though. I do oppose certain kinds of taxation, because of the rights that I believe we have. I thought the way I addressed the parent comment was much more on-topic than the response you insist I should have provided. It was within the context of what the parent comment's argument was, making it relatable and relevant. It also expressed exactly what I believed. I don't think it's constructive to attack me because I expressed my view in a manner you disapprove of.
    - nailer 9y ago
      You're right, it's not a justification. The reason I think we do all those things is because it's good for society: there might be talented kids that have poor parents, so giving them a good start in life creates more successful adults. More successful adults is good for the economy and for the harmoniousness of society.
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        We could provide people with the market means to provide student loans to the parents of promising children. Then the market will take care of it, without any compulsion, and far more effectively than a nondiscriminating blanket redistribution based solely on reported income levels. I personally think that guaranteeing equality of opportunity will have more negative social effects than positive, by reducing incentive to produce resources in order to provide for one's own children, since one can instead be poor and let the state force other people to pay for their upbringing.
- openasocket 9y ago
  You're talking like we don't do these things already. We've have public schools for over a century, we have various forms of welfare, all kinds of special grant programs to help the poor pay for college, etc. And society hasn't collapsed, the poor aren't popping out a dozen kids because they know they get free primary education. All people are proposing is that we improve these programs. It's not an ideological argument, it's a negotiation over degrees.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    How redistributive were public schools 100 years ago, when they were almost exclusively paid for by local taxes within communities where people had very similar levels of income, and when education spending as a share of GDP was miniscule compared to today? I would argue that the harm of redistribution has historically been more than counterbalanced by the accelerating rate of technological innovation, but that the last 40 years suggests that the growth of the harmful effects of welfarism are starting to outpace the accelerating natural-rate of innovation. That's what GDP and income growth figures would suggest to me. Also the explosion in single parenthood.
    - Rapzid 9y ago
      Only 100 years ago? A lot? It appears the federal government has been involved in public education nearly from the start. Article I Section 8 of the constitution provides impetus; "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;". From the very start the federal government has provided land grants for public schools, and States have been happily applying funds received from the federal government to the costs of education.
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        The federal department of education was only created in 1980. All government spending on education, as a percentage of GDP, was a tiny fraction of what it is today. And the revenue for the education spending was weighted far more towards local sources, making it less redistributive.
- kefka 9y ago
  Yeah, I know right? Those poor people's kids don't deserve: Clean water, electricity, a home, education, or any of those "rich people" things. If they did deserve it, they'd have them. Since they dont, they deserve a life of misery, suffering, and edging to destitution. ^^^ If you can understand the above, its the reason why youre on the wrong side of history here. You can couch the discussion as "stealing from the rich"... But in the end, we all should have equal access and usage to the essentials of life. We have more than enough resources; there just being hoarded by greedy people who are great at explaining why they deserve it.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    They don't deserve to take someone else's money by force, in order to pay for those things. I don't think opposing forced income redistribution puts me on the side of history.
    - kefka 9y ago
      And you're internalizing "take someone else's money by force". This really goes back to Americans being temporarily embarrassed capitalists, regardless their real financial livelihood. And working-class thinks that we're talking about them when it comes to "We're gonna take their money" - We are, some. But we're also going to provide a baseline for everyone no matter what. > I don't think opposing forced income redistribution puts me on the side of history. And here we go again. This is a matter of "How does the government serve the citizenry". And right now, not very well. Government's current modus operandi is to privatize the gains and socialize the losses. In other words, their gains is on the backs of our losses. And from that, we have a legitimate claim on those gains, as they should be socialized as well. Why? Because people who are rich did not do so themselves in a little bubble. Their successes rest in part on all of us. And it is easy to say, and act, that they need to pay their fair share. And that fair share would be sufficient in providing basic necessities to everyone, regardless of financial need. People can still make profit, and thrive. I'm not advocating traditional communism. I'm advocating a blend, where the minimums are taken care of. People can still thrive and profit - they just won't be able to stand on our backs for them to get ahead.
- Goronmon 9y ago
  If we force people to subsidize other people's poor children, we create perverse incentives to have a maximum number of children with minimum personal investment in each. It cannot end well for society. You have it reversed. Not providing, say, an education to all children, regardless of parental investment, will leave us with a large number of uneducated citizens languishing to fend for themselves. That sounds pretty bad for society. Not sure how your making the case that educating children ends up poorly for everyone...unless, of course, you mean that it's harder for the wealthy and powerful to control an educated populace compared to an uneducated one. We're simply not taking, by force, money from one person, to spend it raising the children of another. No one is forced to live in a country that provides for it citizens. People can always choose to leave if they feel it's unfair to have basic responsibilities like paying taxes.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    Historically that's not what has happened. Before the era of government education, education was improving rapidly, with literacy rates rising. As government involvement in education has increased, education outcomes have stopped improving: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839935/How-Teachers-Unions-Affect-Education-Production https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839... I'm making the case that forcing people to pay for the costs of raising poor children will create an incentive for people to produce poor children.
    - openasocket 9y ago
      First off, your link explicitly blames teacher's unions, not government involvement, for the lack of increase in education outcomes. You think there are poor people out there thinking: "hey I can have a bunch of kids and they'll all get free educations, let's do it!" Why would they? So that the kid will grow up and get a great job and support them? That's not so much a get-rich-quick scheme as it is a get-rich-in-twenty-to-thirty-years scheme. Plus you'd still have to raise a bunch of kids, which isn't exactly a walk in the park. And the evidence is on my side. Increased access to education is associated with lower fertility rates, not higher: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/completingfertility/RevisedCosio-Zavalapaper.PDF http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/completingfert...
- AbrahamParangi 9y ago
  I'd argue that Society is literally the business of using force to align incentives towards global optima. In the same way that society taxes you to pay for goods and services that others use, others are taxed to pay for services that you use. Society does this because it has been historically more adaptive to make everyone pay for roads, fire departments, and strategic bombers regardless of whether or not they actually want them. If you don't think people should be forced to pay for things that others use, I challenge you to find a society where this doesn't happen.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    I find that to be an odd definition of society. I think you mean government. And I don't believe redistribution from effective producers of economic resources to less effective producers is societally beneficial.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  What cannot end well for society is an underclass with limited social mobility and access to guns. If justice is the greatest happiness for the greatest number, some degree of equitable income redistribution is a moral imperative. The exact degree needs to be experimentally determined, as income redistribution does reduce individual autonomy (which has the side effect of reducing happiness) and incentive to work (which results in less wealth to redistribute). The exact amount is also probably population specific, with cohesive, homogeneous populations tolerating more redistribution.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    The standard of living of the world's poor is improving faster than ever. I don't see cause to be concerned about a violent revolution. As for the greater good justification: given income redistribution reduces how much wealth is generated, which you acknowledge, it goes to reason that over an infinite timescale, the society without income redistribution will become infinitely wealthier than the one with. A permanent boost to the exponent of economic growth leads, over a long enough time period, to a cumulatively larger gain for the welfare of the poor than any increase in redistribution could provide them, since the benefits of a permanent increase in the growth rate are recurring.
radicalbyte 9y ago
..and any child with "bad" parents has to work ten times as hard because they've spent their entire life swimming against the current. There's a reason why certain communities have radically different outcomes. The more motivated kind set their offspring up so that the default outcome is, on average, success. They have to try hard to not succeed.
- djrogers 9y ago
  > They have to try hard to not succeed. That is utter crap. They do have to make some bad decisions, but it's not like success is guaranteed for everyone who grows up in a white middle class neighborhood.
  - eastWestMath 9y ago
    And being tall doesn't mean you'll be a great basketball player, but it makes it way fucking easier.
  - CocaKoala 9y ago
    Just because it's possible to fail doesn't mean that it isn't easier to succeed. Consider the case of Eric Couch, who stole two cases of beer, drove 70 mp/h (30 miles per hour over the speed limit) and crashed, killing four people. Two hours after the crash, his BAC was .24%. He was 18. His lawyer argued that he suffered from 'affluenza', and he was sentenced to probation and therapy; note that Eric was a repeat offender (having been previously cited for Minor in Possession and Minor in Consumption of Alcohol. Eric Couch wasn't sentenced to a jail term until he violated the terms of his probation and fled to Mexico. Success isn't guaranteed, but does everybody get the same leeway as Eric Couch?
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    >it's not like success is guaranteed for everyone who grows up in a white middle class neighborhood. You know, if people can grow up in a privileged, middle-class neighborhood, unharmed by want or oppression, work reasonably hard, put in a normal level of effort, make reasonable-in-expectation decisions... and then wind up poor? Something is very wrong.

Because the children have no control over who their parents are, and we shouldn't punish with a lifetime of diminished opportunities because their parents aren't as "good" as others.

Jabanga 9y ago

But we're not punishing them. We're simply not taking, by force, money from one person, to spend it raising the children of another. If we force people to subsidize other people's poor children, we create perverse incentives to have a maximum number of children with minimum personal investment in each. It cannot end well for society.

nailer 9y ago
We force people to pay for roads, firefighters, police, healthcare and ensure all children have the same opportunity. Healthy adults can stand for themselves, children and the ill need protection.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  But that's not a justification. That's just telling me we do this a lot.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    Look, if you want to drag out the old "taxation is theft" chestnut, I'm going to drag out the "property is theft" chestnut, and everyone else can drag out their old chestnuts, and we can totally derail the thread. Do you want to derail the thread just to vomit out slogans we've all heard a thousand times and found wanting?
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      I don't think that's very constructive. The parent comment said [X] should be the rallying cry. I said in my opinion it shouldn't, and I gave my rationale. By all means bring out your chestnuts. I welcome a rigorous discussion, instead of blind conformity to mainstream political mores.
      - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
        No, you don't welcome a rigorous discussion. You want to repeat discussions we've already had, in which you were not persuaded to others' points of view, and you didn't persuade them either. The likelihood that we'll all see the divine light of von Mises and convert this time is extraordinarily low. Stop trying.
        Jabanga 9y ago
        I'm expressing my views. It's not constructive to tell people with minority viewpoints to stop expressing them. I did nothing more than what the parent comment did. I also don't think we're in a position to judge the full impact of our words on others, so I don't accept your assessment that no minds were changed by the previous discussions.
        eli_gottlieb 9y ago
        > I'm expressing my views. It's not constructive to tell people with minority viewpoints to stop expressing them. Nobody's telling you not to express your view. The obnoxious thing is to snidely pretend everyone else has to justify their own positions in terms of your view. If you want to say, "taxation is theft", just say it, instead of dragging things out from, "Well why should children have equal opportunities to other children anyways?"
        Jabanga 9y ago
        My position is not that "taxation is theft" though. I do oppose certain kinds of taxation, because of the rights that I believe we have. I thought the way I addressed the parent comment was much more on-topic than the response you insist I should have provided. It was within the context of what the parent comment's argument was, making it relatable and relevant. It also expressed exactly what I believed. I don't think it's constructive to attack me because I expressed my view in a manner you disapprove of.
  - nailer 9y ago
    You're right, it's not a justification. The reason I think we do all those things is because it's good for society: there might be talented kids that have poor parents, so giving them a good start in life creates more successful adults. More successful adults is good for the economy and for the harmoniousness of society.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      We could provide people with the market means to provide student loans to the parents of promising children. Then the market will take care of it, without any compulsion, and far more effectively than a nondiscriminating blanket redistribution based solely on reported income levels. I personally think that guaranteeing equality of opportunity will have more negative social effects than positive, by reducing incentive to produce resources in order to provide for one's own children, since one can instead be poor and let the state force other people to pay for their upbringing.
openasocket 9y ago
You're talking like we don't do these things already. We've have public schools for over a century, we have various forms of welfare, all kinds of special grant programs to help the poor pay for college, etc. And society hasn't collapsed, the poor aren't popping out a dozen kids because they know they get free primary education. All people are proposing is that we improve these programs. It's not an ideological argument, it's a negotiation over degrees.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  How redistributive were public schools 100 years ago, when they were almost exclusively paid for by local taxes within communities where people had very similar levels of income, and when education spending as a share of GDP was miniscule compared to today? I would argue that the harm of redistribution has historically been more than counterbalanced by the accelerating rate of technological innovation, but that the last 40 years suggests that the growth of the harmful effects of welfarism are starting to outpace the accelerating natural-rate of innovation. That's what GDP and income growth figures would suggest to me. Also the explosion in single parenthood.
  - Rapzid 9y ago
    Only 100 years ago? A lot? It appears the federal government has been involved in public education nearly from the start. Article I Section 8 of the constitution provides impetus; "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States;". From the very start the federal government has provided land grants for public schools, and States have been happily applying funds received from the federal government to the costs of education.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      The federal department of education was only created in 1980. All government spending on education, as a percentage of GDP, was a tiny fraction of what it is today. And the revenue for the education spending was weighted far more towards local sources, making it less redistributive.
kefka 9y ago
Yeah, I know right? Those poor people's kids don't deserve: Clean water, electricity, a home, education, or any of those "rich people" things. If they did deserve it, they'd have them. Since they dont, they deserve a life of misery, suffering, and edging to destitution. ^^^ If you can understand the above, its the reason why youre on the wrong side of history here. You can couch the discussion as "stealing from the rich"... But in the end, we all should have equal access and usage to the essentials of life. We have more than enough resources; there just being hoarded by greedy people who are great at explaining why they deserve it.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  They don't deserve to take someone else's money by force, in order to pay for those things. I don't think opposing forced income redistribution puts me on the side of history.
  - kefka 9y ago
    And you're internalizing "take someone else's money by force". This really goes back to Americans being temporarily embarrassed capitalists, regardless their real financial livelihood. And working-class thinks that we're talking about them when it comes to "We're gonna take their money" - We are, some. But we're also going to provide a baseline for everyone no matter what. > I don't think opposing forced income redistribution puts me on the side of history. And here we go again. This is a matter of "How does the government serve the citizenry". And right now, not very well. Government's current modus operandi is to privatize the gains and socialize the losses. In other words, their gains is on the backs of our losses. And from that, we have a legitimate claim on those gains, as they should be socialized as well. Why? Because people who are rich did not do so themselves in a little bubble. Their successes rest in part on all of us. And it is easy to say, and act, that they need to pay their fair share. And that fair share would be sufficient in providing basic necessities to everyone, regardless of financial need. People can still make profit, and thrive. I'm not advocating traditional communism. I'm advocating a blend, where the minimums are taken care of. People can still thrive and profit - they just won't be able to stand on our backs for them to get ahead.
Goronmon 9y ago
If we force people to subsidize other people's poor children, we create perverse incentives to have a maximum number of children with minimum personal investment in each. It cannot end well for society. You have it reversed. Not providing, say, an education to all children, regardless of parental investment, will leave us with a large number of uneducated citizens languishing to fend for themselves. That sounds pretty bad for society. Not sure how your making the case that educating children ends up poorly for everyone...unless, of course, you mean that it's harder for the wealthy and powerful to control an educated populace compared to an uneducated one. We're simply not taking, by force, money from one person, to spend it raising the children of another. No one is forced to live in a country that provides for it citizens. People can always choose to leave if they feel it's unfair to have basic responsibilities like paying taxes.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Historically that's not what has happened. Before the era of government education, education was improving rapidly, with literacy rates rising. As government involvement in education has increased, education outcomes have stopped improving: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839935/How-Teachers-Unions-Affect-Education-Production https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839... I'm making the case that forcing people to pay for the costs of raising poor children will create an incentive for people to produce poor children.
  - openasocket 9y ago
    First off, your link explicitly blames teacher's unions, not government involvement, for the lack of increase in education outcomes. You think there are poor people out there thinking: "hey I can have a bunch of kids and they'll all get free educations, let's do it!" Why would they? So that the kid will grow up and get a great job and support them? That's not so much a get-rich-quick scheme as it is a get-rich-in-twenty-to-thirty-years scheme. Plus you'd still have to raise a bunch of kids, which isn't exactly a walk in the park. And the evidence is on my side. Increased access to education is associated with lower fertility rates, not higher: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/completingfertility/RevisedCosio-Zavalapaper.PDF http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/completingfert...
AbrahamParangi 9y ago
I'd argue that Society is literally the business of using force to align incentives towards global optima. In the same way that society taxes you to pay for goods and services that others use, others are taxed to pay for services that you use. Society does this because it has been historically more adaptive to make everyone pay for roads, fire departments, and strategic bombers regardless of whether or not they actually want them. If you don't think people should be forced to pay for things that others use, I challenge you to find a society where this doesn't happen.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  I find that to be an odd definition of society. I think you mean government. And I don't believe redistribution from effective producers of economic resources to less effective producers is societally beneficial.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
What cannot end well for society is an underclass with limited social mobility and access to guns. If justice is the greatest happiness for the greatest number, some degree of equitable income redistribution is a moral imperative. The exact degree needs to be experimentally determined, as income redistribution does reduce individual autonomy (which has the side effect of reducing happiness) and incentive to work (which results in less wealth to redistribute). The exact amount is also probably population specific, with cohesive, homogeneous populations tolerating more redistribution.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  The standard of living of the world's poor is improving faster than ever. I don't see cause to be concerned about a violent revolution. As for the greater good justification: given income redistribution reduces how much wealth is generated, which you acknowledge, it goes to reason that over an infinite timescale, the society without income redistribution will become infinitely wealthier than the one with. A permanent boost to the exponent of economic growth leads, over a long enough time period, to a cumulatively larger gain for the welfare of the poor than any increase in redistribution could provide them, since the benefits of a permanent increase in the growth rate are recurring.

radicalbyte 9y ago

..and any child with "bad" parents has to work ten times as hard because they've spent their entire life swimming against the current. There's a reason why certain communities have radically different outcomes. The more motivated kind set their offspring up so that the default outcome is, on average, success. They have to try hard to not succeed.

djrogers 9y ago
> They have to try hard to not succeed. That is utter crap. They do have to make some bad decisions, but it's not like success is guaranteed for everyone who grows up in a white middle class neighborhood.
- eastWestMath 9y ago
  And being tall doesn't mean you'll be a great basketball player, but it makes it way fucking easier.
- CocaKoala 9y ago
  Just because it's possible to fail doesn't mean that it isn't easier to succeed. Consider the case of Eric Couch, who stole two cases of beer, drove 70 mp/h (30 miles per hour over the speed limit) and crashed, killing four people. Two hours after the crash, his BAC was .24%. He was 18. His lawyer argued that he suffered from 'affluenza', and he was sentenced to probation and therapy; note that Eric was a repeat offender (having been previously cited for Minor in Possession and Minor in Consumption of Alcohol. Eric Couch wasn't sentenced to a jail term until he violated the terms of his probation and fled to Mexico. Success isn't guaranteed, but does everybody get the same leeway as Eric Couch?
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >it's not like success is guaranteed for everyone who grows up in a white middle class neighborhood. You know, if people can grow up in a privileged, middle-class neighborhood, unharmed by want or oppression, work reasonably hard, put in a normal level of effort, make reasonable-in-expectation decisions... and then wind up poor? Something is very wrong.