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@WandererUber It'll make the ancaps happier in the long run.
Look, the economy is basically a big machine with lots of numbers and inputs and outputs. We already have a gigantically complicated system. If we just knock around a few elements so they touch each other, and make sure people have the right information or are having the correct decisions made for them behind the scenes, I bet everyone would be a lot happier.

For example, it'd be great if everyone could see at all times all of the government programs and benefits that are available to them based on the criteria they meet, which is all information the government has. Then welfare might actually be effective. This is actually what social workers do, but not everyone has access to a social worker.

@WandererUber My perspective is the economy is a system and it has to be negotiated with. An ancap system can't be conceptualized because it sidelines too many questions.
It's like what Tony Blair said. You should make an agenda of things that are very important to get done, and then keep in mind that campaigning and electioneering and politics is just something you have to do to accomplish it.
Who would own the army? What would we use all this money for? Who would handle the edge cases and gaps in the system?
There's also the possibility that an ancap society would become a rentier society with a very powerful elite that own everything and don't allow competition to emerge. That's just a hypothetical though, because we've never gotten close to a real-world example of anarcho capitalism. Ancap world has to be all-encompassing, because if there's anything left that's non-ancap, it could be blamed for any potential failures that arise. Ancap world is a world that doesn't have any room for deviation in the system.

I think it's better to see it as a machine, with various pieces that work together, and try to figure out how to make those pieces work together. I'm not opposed to welfare, I just think it should be an all-ecompassing income subsidy system. Which, was an idea Friedman had himself. Right now we have a piecemeal system that only benefits people who are given access to it by the gatekeepers, who are the social workers, or perhaps those who take the time to go through every single potential benefit and try to find them all. This is a lot worse than just paying people money for being poor, essentially. I don't believe the only motive for doing things is profit, so I don't believe this would destroy society.

Friedman on the negative income tax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSycbH06S1U

@Griffith bro hit me with Tony Blair AND the "muh roads" in the same reply
It's not even that I disagree with any of this but I wonder what the point is supposed to be when you can just as well ask these questions of the government and in fact this matter is so basic that it's as old a states themselves ("Who watches the watchmen?")

I appreciate your opinion but I also wasn't really trying to relitigate ancapism as a whole, just the idea about welfare being "efficient" or ever even being able to be.

@WandererUber My response to that would be that ancaps work backwards from the market when they should work backwards from the government. At the end of the day, the government created the marketplace. 1000 years ago, they physically created the marketplace. France made a lot of money off of annual fairs the king would arrange. The prince of Kiev would make his money by sailing a trade fleet down the Dnieper and selling the goods he collected in Constantinople. It's impossible to imagine a market without government, but it's not impossible to imagine a government without market.

As for welfare, I simply think there's a necessity to invest in the poor, because there are big gains for little investment. Think education. Another example is land reform. Another example is businesses that started in a parents garage. In that case it came from families, not the state, but that little bit of seed capital can make a huge difference in peoples lives. We're seeing that today with young people struggling to buy houses, and impoverished men struggling to impress women with meager net worths at the beginning of their lives.
In fact, Hitler complains about this. He said that Capitalism unduly favors the old and retards pro-social behavior at younger ages, because it takes time for people to build up meaningful capital.

I think a negative income tax or more comprehensive welfare/tax reform would be a good way of front-loading a persons life, so they're not limited to having money in their 40s or 50s, after decades of work.

@Griffith > It's impossible to imagine a market without government, but it's not impossible to imagine a government without market.
I don't agree with this at all.
The first trade was "fuck off my land or I will kill you with this rock"
That's just a market. Econ and biology are not so different.
You CAN'T imagine a government operating without ECONOMICS, which is the actual apt comparison. The soviets tried this and it just collapsed due to economics. There are rules to this shit. If you ignore them, they don't go away.

>welfare
okay, but I specifically addressed your idea of "making welfare efficient" while leaving it in state hands, didn't I? People can just give to the poor without the state, and in fact they do.

>negative income tax
I looked at that video and either I don't get it or I don't like it.

@WandererUber I do not agree that an ultimatum backed with force is a trade in any meaningful sense of the word, since I'm not even sure what the person on the recieving end of the threat recieved.

I'll simply reiterate that I think welfare is a good thing that is necessary to improve the quality of our finite lives, which is an important objective in and of itself. I also believe there are pracitcal benefits to welfare, which raise the standard of living and productivity of the nation as a whole. I also believe the economy is a system which can be understood and coordinated to bring benefits to the people. I also believe that there are limits to the market, and the market comes after the state, and is downstream of state action, not the other way around. An entirely state economy would still have economics, that idea does not affirm a complete absence of state in favor of the market, which I think is impossible anyway.

A negative income tax is very simple. People get paid back a portion of their unused exemptions. As they earn more and reach their deduction limit, they recieve less money, until eventually they break even, and then begin paying taxes. This would guarentee a minimum income, and would subsidize low income people, while still incentivizing them to earn more. I'd be in favor of something like this but more encompassing to include basic services, but how that would be structured would be a bigger question. In the healthcare market for example, customers can get a tax deduction they can use to pay for their health insurance plan. That deduction decreases as they earn more, so this is a good example of that system.

Also, I think the issue with private welfare is that it's less efficient than public welfare. Which may sound odd, but in practical terms, there is actually a lot of money provided by private charities in the US. Billions of dollars worth. In most cases, this money is less accessible than public welfare. One advantage the government has is that most people pay taxes to the government, and everyone has a SSN and a birth certificate. On top of that, the government goes to lengths to collect information on the people who resides in its territory during the census. In other words, the government has a better idea than most of who needs what. It's hard for a private charity to pull together that sort of information. Then there is the problem of pulling together enough money to make a wide, systemic difference. Private action is very valuable, but usually piecemeal. It would be best if everyone knew of all the resources, public and private, that they could access for X or Y problem. Sewing together the patchwork, so to speak.

@Griffith I don't know how
On the negative income tax it's something that sounds nice on paper but I would have to deep dive why it does not work and what it actually incentivizes. My hunch is that that is something net negative, and the basis for that hunch is that it has been negative the last 10000 times we tried something like this. But I can't ad hoc do that right now so I can't say any more on that.

On the welfare thing, the argument that state-managed is better than private is ex nihilo to me.
Effective welfare has been private for almost all of human history and it worked. The church did a lot of good before they decided to send all their parishioners money to Africa and Israel (hyperbole).
Now you might say if only there was some sort of competition, but the fact remains that the state is the biggest player in the welfare market and guess where they send the money...
These are my arguments for why I think it's the opposite.

On the market without gov thing, I can't say any more. I could try to explain my thinking about how the things you used the shorthand of "market" for are natural emerging phenomena and in my mind intertwined with evolution and biology, but it's not even ancap orthodoxy if such a thing exists nor is it terribly relevant beyond what I said

@WandererUber On church welfare specifically, the church was essentially a second state that spanned across Christendom. Tithes were mandatory and they owned a lot of land. There's not a clear analogy to public/private but I wouldn't consider it purely private.

I don't think you can judge theory purely by contemporary circumstance, since we're trying to change contemporary circumstance, and we're trying to keep the conversation from steering into "when we win" territory. When the National Socialist revolution has been complete and Hitler has returned, etc.

The idea behind a negative income tax is that it eliminates the need for a patchwork of government progams, because it piggybacks on existing tax infrastructure. The IRS already has your tax returns, they can just give you more money. That could be better than giving you some money, plus telling you to sign up for five different government programs plus hunting for private ones. There's a lot of money out there to help people, people just need access to it.

I also don't agree that welfare has never done anything. I don't view all welfare spending as wasteful. Certainly not in theory, but also not as it is today. It still helps people. It's potential is a lot higher than people give it credit for. A few extra dollars in the right place can make a big difference.

@WandererUber One interesting way of looking at welfare could be as a government grant. In many senses of the word. You don't have to pay it back, but how it gets spent is tracked. I think there's a lot of room for that idea. A blank check is more beneficial to some people, could be worse for others. SNAP for instance is probably necessary, because blacks will spend that money on air jordans and then complain that they're hungry. Or worse, booze.

I think one flaw with market logic is that some people make bad decisions no matter what. There's not much mentioned in the way of cognitive load when discussing microeconomics. We all know it's real though. That's why blacks do so poorly in the economy. They have every cognitive variable going against them.

That's why I think a better form of welfare could be sharing cognitive power in the form of information and economic structure. A quick way to make peoples lives better would be to hook them up to effective financial systems and financial schemes, which we've sort of done. Auto insurance is a good example of this. I really like the idea of giving a loan for expenses that people pay back. That would give people a very solid floor, front-load their lifetime income, and still keep them responsible for earning and paying back the debt. There are other problems, and a lot of details that need working out, but that idea is what inspired this autism thread. I think that idea can lead into more effective ideas for improving peoples lives.

@Griffith You completely lost me at
>I think one flaw with market logic is that some people make bad decisions no matter what. [...] We all know it's real though. That's why blacks do so poorly in the economy.

this is precisely think why you should NOT share this with them. You seem to be saying the opposite.
How everything from the single-celled organism up works is that those that make bad calls are less fit and those that make good calls are fitter. This applies to humans whether we like it or not. So if you institute subsidies for being a fucking retard, this means retards will receive resources from non-retards and this will raise their fertility and economic participation, and power, and basically anything else a retard has no business doing.
This is bad and leads to the downfall of civilizations. Repeat.

@WandererUber Can civilization really rest on the foundation of social darwinism? Especially when the sole metric we're measuring here is money?
Are we going to lop off the left side of the bell curve forever?

On top of that, does investing in the bottom of society not allow seeds to germinate and grow? It's a historical fact that the education system allowed a lot of geniuses from the American hinterland to filter into Skunkworks and Bell Labs. There's a genetic strata to talent, but we haven't organized this strata, so isn't it better to cast a wide net?

@Griffith >cast a wide net
it absolutely is but we disagree on whether state welfare does this
Private individuals and enterprise also have an incentive to do this.

>filter into Skunkworks and Bell Labs
It's hardly possible to prove that Bell Labs or Skunkworks had not been able to discover these talents themselves if they couldn't rely on government handouts of capable people. But I think they would have. There are also countless autodidacts and other paths, especially in that time period+early computing (Kernighan was
Canadian, Ritchie's dad already worked at Bell / Wright brothers / etc)
Besides that, education in America was more private than its peers at the time. And it could have been even MORE private.
In some specialized or new fields, education and testing is fully private even to this day.

Regarding the public education system as a whole:
North Korea wiped the floor with the South wrt industrial output for 2 decades before the latter overtook them. I think education had the same happen to it. It sucks ass now.

There is a good documentary on private schooling called School Inc.

>Can civilization really rest on the foundation of social darwinism?
it does whether we like it or not. We have not and will never escape natural selection. You don't have to inflict pain and suffering onto people, you just need to not deliberately punish things you want and subsidize things you don't want. (Working hard and making money/laying about doing nothing - respectively)


>investing in the bottom of society not allow seeds to germinate and grow?
Dennis Ritchie's dad was also a researcher, so no. Intelligence is heritable.
Yes in the sense that you can find gems amongst the coal, but think back on what I said about bad decisions. These people are smart so they would make GOOD decisions instead.
You can substitute smart for "friendly" or "good-looking" or "motivated" and they will still have a peer advantage.
The whole thing is fractal.