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> grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. my personal view (pinko commie in my birth country but centr

> grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale. my personal view (pinko commie in my birth country but centre-right in my adoptive) is that "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Hope is the public good to be provided and defended. Without hope, there is no purpose nor future.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them. The question is how to do that. Some people argue that it's by providing competitive free markets. And that's often true, when the markets are actually competitive and free, but you can also have concentrated markets where the incumbents have captured the regulators, and that doesn't work. Some argue that transfer payments can reduce inequality, and that can also be true (e.g. UBI), but then many of the implementations try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency. Especially when those services are provided by a captured industry, and then they just end up as a subsidy for that industry, which can absorb the subsidies by raising prices. The problem is, when you have one of the degenerate situations as the status quo, people know that something is wrong and start clamoring for change without inherently understanding what change is necessary. And then it's easy for the exact forces that create problems and increase concentration of wealth to propose solutions that enrich themselves rather than addressing the issues. Which often makes it worse as those "solutions" accumulate, increasing overhead, inefficiency and the complexity that allows it to remain opaque and intractable.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency I like our local safety net: it works by subsidising those who need it at tax time, but they acquire all their goods and services on the open market (avoiding distortion).
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    It's kind of amusing the extent to which nominally opposing factions actually agree. Q: How do you help poor people? A: Make them less poor. The right says lower their taxes, the left says transfer payments, mathematically these are the exact same thing. The only real dispute is whether negative tax rates should be used, and de facto negative rates are the status quo and only a real dispute because attempts to make it explicit get muddied by the factions who don't want the problem solved. If housing is overpriced, instead of policies that would reduce the market price of housing (and so lower rents for landlords), they propose rent subsidies (so they get the money), or income-gated housing projects (so they can point to something nominally being done while the market price stays high). Which eats up the money that could have been used for transfer payments/tax cuts while it continues to flow to landlords. And likewise for healthcare costs -- instead of addressing the regulatory causes of high prices, the incumbents keep pushing government subsidies, so that the prices (i.e. their profits) can stay high at the expense of the customer/taxpayer. The fight isn't a question of tax cuts vs. a safety net. The fight is against industry incumbents who want to keep collecting high rents through regulatory capture.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      A local advantage of not having a first-past-the-post system is that centre-right and centre-left parties not only exist but taken together are broadly representative, and hence do spend much of their time working together to find solutions which have been crafted less to be sound-bitey and more to be acceptable to wide swaths of the populace.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Hope is the public good to be provided and defended. Without hope, there is no purpose nor future.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them. The question is how to do that. Some people argue that it's by providing competitive free markets. And that's often true, when the markets are actually competitive and free, but you can also have concentrated markets where the incumbents have captured the regulators, and that doesn't work. Some argue that transfer payments can reduce inequality, and that can also be true (e.g. UBI), but then many of the implementations try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency. Especially when those services are provided by a captured industry, and then they just end up as a subsidy for that industry, which can absorb the subsidies by raising prices. The problem is, when you have one of the degenerate situations as the status quo, people know that something is wrong and start clamoring for change without inherently understanding what change is necessary. And then it's easy for the exact forces that create problems and increase concentration of wealth to propose solutions that enrich themselves rather than addressing the issues. Which often makes it worse as those "solutions" accumulate, increasing overhead, inefficiency and the complexity that allows it to remain opaque and intractable.

082349872349872 3y ago
> try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency I like our local safety net: it works by subsidising those who need it at tax time, but they acquire all their goods and services on the open market (avoiding distortion).
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  It's kind of amusing the extent to which nominally opposing factions actually agree. Q: How do you help poor people? A: Make them less poor. The right says lower their taxes, the left says transfer payments, mathematically these are the exact same thing. The only real dispute is whether negative tax rates should be used, and de facto negative rates are the status quo and only a real dispute because attempts to make it explicit get muddied by the factions who don't want the problem solved. If housing is overpriced, instead of policies that would reduce the market price of housing (and so lower rents for landlords), they propose rent subsidies (so they get the money), or income-gated housing projects (so they can point to something nominally being done while the market price stays high). Which eats up the money that could have been used for transfer payments/tax cuts while it continues to flow to landlords. And likewise for healthcare costs -- instead of addressing the regulatory causes of high prices, the incumbents keep pushing government subsidies, so that the prices (i.e. their profits) can stay high at the expense of the customer/taxpayer. The fight isn't a question of tax cuts vs. a safety net. The fight is against industry incumbents who want to keep collecting high rents through regulatory capture.
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    A local advantage of not having a first-past-the-post system is that centre-right and centre-left parties not only exist but taken together are broadly representative, and hence do spend much of their time working together to find solutions which have been crafted less to be sound-bitey and more to be acceptable to wide swaths of the populace.