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I'd also like to think optimistically of society. And so if something is wrong there it's natural to want to assume an extrinsic cause. And certainly you can al

I'd also like to think optimistically of society. And so if something is wrong there it's natural to want to assume an extrinsic cause. And certainly you can always find something. I certainly agree with your comments about food, yet at the same time I'm not sure we can assume that society itself is not the problem. For instance if people simply stopped drinking soda that alone would send obesity rates down significantly. And soda is far more expensive than tap water and a filter, or tossing tea leaves or bags in a $10 coffee machine. Yet people choose to pay more for a liquid that's detrimental to their health. And it's not a secret that soda is bad for you. So should we tax soda to death or even consider banning it? That's where I would not agree. I value freedom over anything else in a society. Since if you have freedom, you can make the decisions that you see personally most likely to produce positive results for you. And as the recent GDPR vs EU Copyright Act emphasized, in a strikingly brief period of time, the same powers that can be used to do things we perceive to be beneficial for society can, and will, then be used to turn against society to the benefit of entrenched interests. I also think it's important to consider what 'same reward for same effort' would imply. Should I choose to write books, ought I expect the same reward as Stephen King choosing to write his next book? If I choose to get into basketball should I expect the same reward as an individual who's hyper athletic and 6'11"? Of course not. Equality of reward is an idea that sounds like something you ought desire but underneath the surface it is a dystopia that requires complete and indistinguishable sameness in absolutely every way. As without this sameness, the same effort will invariably yield different results. The game of life is all about finding what your maximizing function is there and pushing it.

lifeformed 8y ago
I'm not pushing for equality of reward, but rather equality of opportunity. So not that your writing should be valued the same as Stephen King's, but that if you want to write, you should have access to quality education and publishing resources. I'm not one to deny true market values, but we can level the playing field a bit. And when I say that, I don't mean taking others down a notch to make things even, I mean raising up the floor so that everyone is at least at a reasonable baseline level where they can make there fair effort to get further. (I guess "leveling the playing field" is a bad analogy, since it sounds like trimming down the peaks. I wonder if there's a better one that implies raising up the bottom?) And I agree that banning soda doesn't make sense, but I could see an argument for taxing it, the same way we do with alcohol. A lot of products have external costs that aren't factored in and are instead borne by the public. Increased sugar consumption results in greater costs to public health. Regardless of who's fault it is, it affects all of us. Taxing it would be a roughly fairer way of distributing the burden. It's definitely not a perfect solution, but would probably give better results than what we have now, if looking at the big picture. I do think personal freedom of choice is extremely important, and we shouldn't have the government exert too much influence on those choices. But I think there is a healthy balance to strike where we can shape better outcomes for society as a whole, while keeping things fair at an individual level. A small tax would only be a disincentive, a suggestion, not a prohibition.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  I'd again generally agree, but with some variations on similar ideas. Here for instance instead of trying to tax sugary beverages, I think positive motivators tend to work much better. Imagine a sliding incentive scale on caloric content for non-water drinks that do not contain artificial sweeteners. Anything with fewer than perhaps 100 calories liter of liquid would receive a 40% tax deduction. Anything with less than 50 calories per liter of liquid would receive a 60% tax deduction, and anything with fewer than 5 calories per liter would receive an 80% tax deduction. This would not only encourage more competition from new companies, but even incentivize current companies to diversify (and advertise!) their healthier options. By contrast a small tax is mostly just going to be passed onto consumers (and then some, as is often the case) who are already making financially and 'healthfully' dubious decisions. This is also analogous to the situation with the EU trying to force Netflix to have 30% of their catalog in each region come from region-sourced material. Instead of this, which is going to result in the bare minimum adherence, imagine if they instead granted Netflix a sliding tax reduction dependent on what percent of their revenue was generated from local region-sourced material. Now they suddenly have a major incentive for that material to succeed. Make people want to do good, and they will. I'm not so hot on external cost calculations. There are two reasons for this. The first is that if you're going to factor in external costs to something, should you not also factor in external benefits to something? Pollutants have a substantial external cost associated with them. At the same time those very pollutants are arguably the single biggest factor in why we are today a 'modern' society. How much ongoing revenue and productivity can be directly attributed to these very pollutants? The second is because it's difficult to objectively measure external costs. Imagine all of the things that you can show some paper or another (and at times the consensus) attributing directly to video games. The cost could almost certainly be shown to be in the trillions of dollars. I completely agree about trying to increase equality of opportunity, but at the same time I think we're already much closer to that plateau of sharply diminishing returns than our current state of inequality would suggest. I mean in all reality you can go from poverty to not-poverty with little more than doing well in school and choosing a productive major. Bill Clinton became one of the most powerful men in politics and came from what could only be described as white trash beginnings. Obama, a half black middle class man with a Kenyan father who lived in Hawaii, would do the same. I used to always think that a true sign of equality of opportunity would be most of everybody doing well. Spending a while in the workforce destroyed that idealism. On top of making completely illogical decisions, many people just don't seem to have have any ambition or direction whatsoever, and I do not think can be attributed as an effect of the system of work itself.

lifeformed 8y ago

I'm not pushing for equality of reward, but rather equality of opportunity. So not that your writing should be valued the same as Stephen King's, but that if you want to write, you should have access to quality education and publishing resources. I'm not one to deny true market values, but we can level the playing field a bit. And when I say that, I don't mean taking others down a notch to make things even, I mean raising up the floor so that everyone is at least at a reasonable baseline level where they can make there fair effort to get further. (I guess "leveling the playing field" is a bad analogy, since it sounds like trimming down the peaks. I wonder if there's a better one that implies raising up the bottom?) And I agree that banning soda doesn't make sense, but I could see an argument for taxing it, the same way we do with alcohol. A lot of products have external costs that aren't factored in and are instead borne by the public. Increased sugar consumption results in greater costs to public health. Regardless of who's fault it is, it affects all of us. Taxing it would be a roughly fairer way of distributing the burden. It's definitely not a perfect solution, but would probably give better results than what we have now, if looking at the big picture. I do think personal freedom of choice is extremely important, and we shouldn't have the government exert too much influence on those choices. But I think there is a healthy balance to strike where we can shape better outcomes for society as a whole, while keeping things fair at an individual level. A small tax would only be a disincentive, a suggestion, not a prohibition.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I'd again generally agree, but with some variations on similar ideas. Here for instance instead of trying to tax sugary beverages, I think positive motivators tend to work much better. Imagine a sliding incentive scale on caloric content for non-water drinks that do not contain artificial sweeteners. Anything with fewer than perhaps 100 calories liter of liquid would receive a 40% tax deduction. Anything with less than 50 calories per liter of liquid would receive a 60% tax deduction, and anything with fewer than 5 calories per liter would receive an 80% tax deduction. This would not only encourage more competition from new companies, but even incentivize current companies to diversify (and advertise!) their healthier options. By contrast a small tax is mostly just going to be passed onto consumers (and then some, as is often the case) who are already making financially and 'healthfully' dubious decisions. This is also analogous to the situation with the EU trying to force Netflix to have 30% of their catalog in each region come from region-sourced material. Instead of this, which is going to result in the bare minimum adherence, imagine if they instead granted Netflix a sliding tax reduction dependent on what percent of their revenue was generated from local region-sourced material. Now they suddenly have a major incentive for that material to succeed. Make people want to do good, and they will. I'm not so hot on external cost calculations. There are two reasons for this. The first is that if you're going to factor in external costs to something, should you not also factor in external benefits to something? Pollutants have a substantial external cost associated with them. At the same time those very pollutants are arguably the single biggest factor in why we are today a 'modern' society. How much ongoing revenue and productivity can be directly attributed to these very pollutants? The second is because it's difficult to objectively measure external costs. Imagine all of the things that you can show some paper or another (and at times the consensus) attributing directly to video games. The cost could almost certainly be shown to be in the trillions of dollars. I completely agree about trying to increase equality of opportunity, but at the same time I think we're already much closer to that plateau of sharply diminishing returns than our current state of inequality would suggest. I mean in all reality you can go from poverty to not-poverty with little more than doing well in school and choosing a productive major. Bill Clinton became one of the most powerful men in politics and came from what could only be described as white trash beginnings. Obama, a half black middle class man with a Kenyan father who lived in Hawaii, would do the same. I used to always think that a true sign of equality of opportunity would be most of everybody doing well. Spending a while in the workforce destroyed that idealism. On top of making completely illogical decisions, many people just don't seem to have have any ambition or direction whatsoever, and I do not think can be attributed as an effect of the system of work itself.