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> You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage

> You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage in forcible extortion from peaceful people who do not desire to finance your pet projects. But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer. The buyer pays no matter what, the provider doesn't have to take any notice of the level of satisfaction that the buyer has with the service. This is the root cause of government inefficiency, it is not "effective". > without providing any effective alternative If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so. All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives. > "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor. In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants. This is completely false, in the absence of state environmental regulations there will still remain an enormous demand for pristine environments. Why are the contaminant levels in your local theme park well below the regulatory levels allowed in all cases? Because they have a vested interest in keeping that space maintained to an even higher level than the machinery of the state coerces them to, and so it goes for all agencies in similar positions. In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control. That you'd call state education a success story defies belief. > You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver. You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service? It's simply not good business to be a bad business, unless your customers don't have a choice on whether or not they pay your bills, like say state provided goods and services. Think of it in terms of Nash equilibriums, what is the stable state of a business that does not make good on its deals and cannot force new customers to patronise it? To go out of business. What is the stable state of the most efficient business in any given sector where customers are free to choose amongst all of the entities in that sector? To drive the profit margin toward zero, lower costs and increase quality. What is the stable state of an agency that is held accountable only by politics and is immune to the direct pressure of market forces resulting from poor performance? The agency with the best politicians wins, the performance of that agency is largely irrelevant except insofar as it is necessary to bolster the political goals of the agency in question. And that's what we end up with in all cases. > The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes Negative sir, that's a strawman. The argument I want to make is that taxes are an extremely inefficient way to actually fund the provision of goods and services, with all the concurrent effects you can assume from that. Providers that can only exist by extorting their customers should not exist, they should not be compelled to provide their sub par services for no return. > But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world. And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict. Or you could just try to actually provide value for your fellow humans in return for the things that you want and need in life. What is the path of least resistance? > You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous. It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this. As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival, and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them and would rather see them starve, freeze or die of disease. That is your sole remaining justification for the existence of the massively inefficient bureaucracy that forcibly confiscates many months of every year from the lives of the entire remaining productive populace. You'll excuse me if I'm not sold.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
>Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage in forcible extortion from peaceful people who do not desire to finance your pet projects. You can't have peace without the threat of force. If I come to your house and start claiming all your stuff, either you or somebody else is going to have to stop me by force or you're soon not going to have any stuff. >But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer. Now you're conflating effectiveness with efficiency. The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list. The existing size of government is ridiculously out of control, especially the federal government, primarily because of blatant corruption. You still haven't provided an alternative effective means of educating millions of poor children whose parents can't afford to send them to private schools. >If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so. >All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives. You're trying to claim the middle. I don't want the middle. Nobody is arguing that the government would be better at manufacturing microprocessors than Samsung or Intel. Nobody wants the government to manufacture and sell microprocessors. The issue is that there are circumstances where the market fails and society benefits from government intervention. Let's look at education. Educating the poor is socially beneficial because it converts would-be vagrants and criminals into productive members of society by allowing them to do skilled labor and earn higher wages, which in turn makes them less desperate and less likely to end up in prison or draining the resources of social welfare charities. So what are the private sector options for funding the education of poor children? Either you make the kids and their families pay for it (student loans), or you find somebody else to pay for it (charity). The problem with student loans (in addition to the indentured servitude problem we already see at the college level) is that it fails to capture the externalities. Part of the benefit of someone becoming a doctor instead of a thief goes to the hospital, to its patients, to the would-be thief's victims who no longer have their property stolen, to whoever it is we have funding the prisons who no longer have to pay to incarcerate this person, etc. Those benefits aren't entirely captured by the higher wages earned by the person to be educated, which means they can't be paid in interest to the bank providing the student loan, which means the bank will often be unwilling to make the loan at an interest rate the borrower would be able to pay even though educating that person would nevertheless result in a net benefit to society. So we're left with charity, which means we're in trouble. Because all those individuals who benefit from the externalities of educating the poor? They're not organized. They don't individually have time to do a cost/benefit analysis on charitable donations, and doing so is hugely inefficient in any event because it requires a massive duplication of effort by millions of individual contributors. Which means contributions don't go to the right place, and there is the same sort of lack of accountability as there is with government because millions of individual contributors have trouble holding a charity accountable in much the same way as millions of voters do a government. You mix these two together and you get a fact of modern charities: The charities spend an enormous amount of donated money soliciting for more donations, because spending two million dollars on advertising which brings you three million dollars in additional donations nets you a million dollars of cash money. So much for private sector efficiency. On top of that, charities have a free rider problem that taxation solves. You benefit from the work of charities whether you know it or not and whether you contribute or not, and you don't have to contribute. Perhaps you're socially minded and you do anyway, but some people aren't, and they won't. So in order to collect the same amount of money, the charity will have to solicit more from each contributor. Not all contributors will be willing to pay more, which once again increases the amount the charity needs from those remaining, and increases the amount of money the charity has to waste soliciting donations to net the same amount of funding. A few rounds of this and you quickly end up with large inefficiencies and a significant shortfall from the socially optimal level of education funding. >In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants. See, this is why nobody takes you guys seriously. The market is going to provide specific locations which are free of environmental contaminants and the rest of the world is fair game for toxic waste and unbreathable air? Seriously? On top of that, how are you expecting to maintain these pristine environments against unregulated neighbors? What is your hypothetical theme park supposed to do when its closest neighbor starts burning used tires in an open pit? Pick up and move? Buy all the surrounding property for a hundred miles? >In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control. Good teachers teaching small class sizes are expensive. The internet hasn't changed that. > You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service? That being the exclusive means of enforcing contracts would create insurmountable barriers to entry for new market participants with no reputations and create a significant advantage for larger and more established companies, resulting in market consolidation, monopolies and the consequent massive inefficiency. >And that's what we end up with in all cases. This is really the whole flaw in your argument. What we end up with in most cases is not what we end up with in all cases. There are important cases where the market fails and the government can do better. >And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict. Aren't you now refuting your whole philosophy? The citizens of this country earned the right to govern it by taking independence from the crown. We now collectively own the country. If you want to live here you follow the rules we collectively set through the process of democratic elections. If you want to live in a state of anarchy then feel free to win your own war of independence or colonize Mars and establish your own government or lack thereof. >It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this. It is ridiculous, because neither is voluntary: >As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival The ability to get a job or have a choice between several jobs doesn't imply that taking any such job is voluntary when refusal to choose your master results in homelessness and starvation. That's the point. You pay your taxes under the threat of incarceration, you work for the owners of capital under the threat of death by starvation. I don't see that the one is particularly morally superior to the other. >and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them How can this be foreign to you? The whole "children starving in Africa" thing is actual reality. Actual human children with no food, no medicine and no education. That's what the complete lack of government looks like.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

>Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage in forcible extortion from peaceful people who do not desire to finance your pet projects. You can't have peace without the threat of force. If I come to your house and start claiming all your stuff, either you or somebody else is going to have to stop me by force or you're soon not going to have any stuff. >But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer. Now you're conflating effectiveness with efficiency. The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list. The existing size of government is ridiculously out of control, especially the federal government, primarily because of blatant corruption. You still haven't provided an alternative effective means of educating millions of poor children whose parents can't afford to send them to private schools. >If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so. >All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives. You're trying to claim the middle. I don't want the middle. Nobody is arguing that the government would be better at manufacturing microprocessors than Samsung or Intel. Nobody wants the government to manufacture and sell microprocessors. The issue is that there are circumstances where the market fails and society benefits from government intervention. Let's look at education. Educating the poor is socially beneficial because it converts would-be vagrants and criminals into productive members of society by allowing them to do skilled labor and earn higher wages, which in turn makes them less desperate and less likely to end up in prison or draining the resources of social welfare charities. So what are the private sector options for funding the education of poor children? Either you make the kids and their families pay for it (student loans), or you find somebody else to pay for it (charity). The problem with student loans (in addition to the indentured servitude problem we already see at the college level) is that it fails to capture the externalities. Part of the benefit of someone becoming a doctor instead of a thief goes to the hospital, to its patients, to the would-be thief's victims who no longer have their property stolen, to whoever it is we have funding the prisons who no longer have to pay to incarcerate this person, etc. Those benefits aren't entirely captured by the higher wages earned by the person to be educated, which means they can't be paid in interest to the bank providing the student loan, which means the bank will often be unwilling to make the loan at an interest rate the borrower would be able to pay even though educating that person would nevertheless result in a net benefit to society. So we're left with charity, which means we're in trouble. Because all those individuals who benefit from the externalities of educating the poor? They're not organized. They don't individually have time to do a cost/benefit analysis on charitable donations, and doing so is hugely inefficient in any event because it requires a massive duplication of effort by millions of individual contributors. Which means contributions don't go to the right place, and there is the same sort of lack of accountability as there is with government because millions of individual contributors have trouble holding a charity accountable in much the same way as millions of voters do a government. You mix these two together and you get a fact of modern charities: The charities spend an enormous amount of donated money soliciting for more donations, because spending two million dollars on advertising which brings you three million dollars in additional donations nets you a million dollars of cash money. So much for private sector efficiency. On top of that, charities have a free rider problem that taxation solves. You benefit from the work of charities whether you know it or not and whether you contribute or not, and you don't have to contribute. Perhaps you're socially minded and you do anyway, but some people aren't, and they won't. So in order to collect the same amount of money, the charity will have to solicit more from each contributor. Not all contributors will be willing to pay more, which once again increases the amount the charity needs from those remaining, and increases the amount of money the charity has to waste soliciting donations to net the same amount of funding. A few rounds of this and you quickly end up with large inefficiencies and a significant shortfall from the socially optimal level of education funding. >In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants. See, this is why nobody takes you guys seriously. The market is going to provide specific locations which are free of environmental contaminants and the rest of the world is fair game for toxic waste and unbreathable air? Seriously? On top of that, how are you expecting to maintain these pristine environments against unregulated neighbors? What is your hypothetical theme park supposed to do when its closest neighbor starts burning used tires in an open pit? Pick up and move? Buy all the surrounding property for a hundred miles? >In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control. Good teachers teaching small class sizes are expensive. The internet hasn't changed that. > You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service? That being the exclusive means of enforcing contracts would create insurmountable barriers to entry for new market participants with no reputations and create a significant advantage for larger and more established companies, resulting in market consolidation, monopolies and the consequent massive inefficiency. >And that's what we end up with in all cases. This is really the whole flaw in your argument. What we end up with in most cases is not what we end up with in all cases. There are important cases where the market fails and the government can do better. >And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict. Aren't you now refuting your whole philosophy? The citizens of this country earned the right to govern it by taking independence from the crown. We now collectively own the country. If you want to live here you follow the rules we collectively set through the process of democratic elections. If you want to live in a state of anarchy then feel free to win your own war of independence or colonize Mars and establish your own government or lack thereof. >It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this. It is ridiculous, because neither is voluntary: >As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival The ability to get a job or have a choice between several jobs doesn't imply that taking any such job is voluntary when refusal to choose your master results in homelessness and starvation. That's the point. You pay your taxes under the threat of incarceration, you work for the owners of capital under the threat of death by starvation. I don't see that the one is particularly morally superior to the other. >and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them How can this be foreign to you? The whole "children starving in Africa" thing is actual reality. Actual human children with no food, no medicine and no education. That's what the complete lack of government looks like.