6 ms·

Organized crime syndicates needs income as well. They even printed services such as feeding the poor, building roads, & martial defense from time to time. Bette

Organized crime syndicates needs income as well. They even printed services such as feeding the poor, building roads, & martial defense from time to time. Better yet, they also believe in Democracy. Point being, the government can earn its money just like the rest of us; by providing services in the open market which we have the option to purchase or not purchase. If the government provides useful services, people will voluntarily purchase those services. If not, the government will need to provide more valuable services, reduce costs, or go bankrupt. Either way, the citizenry should not be liable for the irresponsible mismanagement, grifting, & mass violence that is made possible by compulsory income tax.

bumby 6y ago
I think this assessment falls prey to the usual issues libertarianism has as it tries to move from the theoretical to the practical. It relies on a couple assumptions to ensure that good decisions can be made by the citizenry: 1) that information is symmetric and acquiring this information is relatively frictionless and 2) that humans make rational decisions, particularly as it pertains to risk uncertainty. There's quite a bit of research that undermines each assumption, especially in behavior economics.
- briantakita 6y ago
  Your assessment falls prey to classic self-serving statist blunders in logic, such as the state has the ultimate monopoly on ethics & it's enforcement. Even if information is asymmetric & humans don't always make rational decisions, you are running under the assumption that human government officials are somehow immune from these asymmetries, irrational decisions, & bouts of dishonesty. With government having the ultimate monopoly of power & acting "for the greater good", it's not surprising that government officials will always act in their own interests at the expense of the citizenry. Every system is ultimately gamed over time. Even if the government official is 100% benevolent, maintains 100% benevolence over the entire career, & gains sufficient power to make decisions (probably impossible), that official lacks the ability to model every citizen's unique set of preferences & optimizations better than that individual citizen's ability to make their own choices.
  - bumby 6y ago
    >you are running under the assumption that human government officials are somehow immune from these asymmetries I may need you to elaborate a bit on this for me to really understand your point. Am I claiming that politicians are magically immune from cognitive biases? Absolutely not; I'm actually claiming the opposite: nobody is immune from them. That is exactly why laws and regulations exist to provide the guardrails for better decisions. There's certainly a point where overreach happens, but I don't think you've yet made a very concrete argument about how the extreme of no government somehow is an improvement over some government. Or are you claiming government can't alleviate the asymmetries of information (the actual 'asymmetry' in my OP)? I do think the government is better at this via regulations. See the Sarbanes-Oxley Act about disclosing accurate financial information passed in the wake of Enron as a concrete example. >official lacks the ability to model every citizen's unique set of preferences & optimizations better than that individual citizen's ability to make their own choices. Except it's not a case of a lone official. It tends to be a case of groups of officials and experts. And yes, each has their own biases, but with a diverse group there's a lesser chance that a single bias will overrule the decision (unlike at the individual level). With modern society as complicated as it is, do you think an individual has the bandwidth to properly gauge risk in terms of items like public health, transportation, engineering, etc.? The mechanism chosen by citizenry in most Western countries is to choose the constituent politicians and policies via a voting mechanism rather than shoulder the burden of making all those decisions individually. The utopian ideal you espouse seems better suited to fun though experiments than a large society that must also factor in pragmatism. It's a bit of a privileged indulgence in that sense. I suspect that's why it hasn't ever been implemented in a large, diverse, and complicated society facing tough problems. I understand the seductive allure of libertarianism; it feels like a straightforward and simple way to maximize freedom. Unfortunately, most people in society want to optimize across more domains than just freedom. They want security as well as other objectives that may be in conflict with absolute freedom. You can see this play out in countries that are borderline failed states. Unfortunately, I think the framework you advocate to maximize freedom almost naively over-simplifies the model of the human condition.
    - briantakita 6y ago

bumby 6y ago

I think this assessment falls prey to the usual issues libertarianism has as it tries to move from the theoretical to the practical. It relies on a couple assumptions to ensure that good decisions can be made by the citizenry: 1) that information is symmetric and acquiring this information is relatively frictionless and 2) that humans make rational decisions, particularly as it pertains to risk uncertainty. There's quite a bit of research that undermines each assumption, especially in behavior economics.

briantakita 6y ago
Your assessment falls prey to classic self-serving statist blunders in logic, such as the state has the ultimate monopoly on ethics & it's enforcement. Even if information is asymmetric & humans don't always make rational decisions, you are running under the assumption that human government officials are somehow immune from these asymmetries, irrational decisions, & bouts of dishonesty. With government having the ultimate monopoly of power & acting "for the greater good", it's not surprising that government officials will always act in their own interests at the expense of the citizenry. Every system is ultimately gamed over time. Even if the government official is 100% benevolent, maintains 100% benevolence over the entire career, & gains sufficient power to make decisions (probably impossible), that official lacks the ability to model every citizen's unique set of preferences & optimizations better than that individual citizen's ability to make their own choices.
- bumby 6y ago
  >you are running under the assumption that human government officials are somehow immune from these asymmetries I may need you to elaborate a bit on this for me to really understand your point. Am I claiming that politicians are magically immune from cognitive biases? Absolutely not; I'm actually claiming the opposite: nobody is immune from them. That is exactly why laws and regulations exist to provide the guardrails for better decisions. There's certainly a point where overreach happens, but I don't think you've yet made a very concrete argument about how the extreme of no government somehow is an improvement over some government. Or are you claiming government can't alleviate the asymmetries of information (the actual 'asymmetry' in my OP)? I do think the government is better at this via regulations. See the Sarbanes-Oxley Act about disclosing accurate financial information passed in the wake of Enron as a concrete example. >official lacks the ability to model every citizen's unique set of preferences & optimizations better than that individual citizen's ability to make their own choices. Except it's not a case of a lone official. It tends to be a case of groups of officials and experts. And yes, each has their own biases, but with a diverse group there's a lesser chance that a single bias will overrule the decision (unlike at the individual level). With modern society as complicated as it is, do you think an individual has the bandwidth to properly gauge risk in terms of items like public health, transportation, engineering, etc.? The mechanism chosen by citizenry in most Western countries is to choose the constituent politicians and policies via a voting mechanism rather than shoulder the burden of making all those decisions individually. The utopian ideal you espouse seems better suited to fun though experiments than a large society that must also factor in pragmatism. It's a bit of a privileged indulgence in that sense. I suspect that's why it hasn't ever been implemented in a large, diverse, and complicated society facing tough problems. I understand the seductive allure of libertarianism; it feels like a straightforward and simple way to maximize freedom. Unfortunately, most people in society want to optimize across more domains than just freedom. They want security as well as other objectives that may be in conflict with absolute freedom. You can see this play out in countries that are borderline failed states. Unfortunately, I think the framework you advocate to maximize freedom almost naively over-simplifies the model of the human condition.
  - briantakita 6y ago