Egregoros

@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.

@WandererUber @Griffith Circling back to what he said, markets still rely on the state to function, because they can't function without courts and police enforcing the rules. The old libertarian line was that the initiation of the use of force (or threat thereof) was where the free market ends and the government begins, but that force is going to happen by SOMEONE, and whoever wins gets to set the rules. So ultimately free markets need people with guns to protect them, and you have to give those people a reason to protect them instead of turning on you. When capitalism includes legalized drug pushers (pharma) and rigged gambling (stock markets), it's hard to see why people should defend that.

But you're also right that Social Darwinism needs to happen because evolution affects humans too: feed the retards, and before long your society is filled with retards. The compromise is generally that you find the poor but capable people in your society and prop them up so they're not affected by the worst excesses of a pure capitalist system, but not so much that you're feeding the retards. Welfare should be restricted from the lowest tier, unless they voluntarily get sterilized so they don't reproduce.

This compromise was reached by a certain Austrian painter, and I don't see why it can't happen again. German industries were free to seek wealth as long as they weren't hurting the people as a whole, and the poor were cared for in exchange for loyalty and service. Such a system could work again, provided the Epstein Class are driven out first.

@WandererUber You could say that about anything. Ford built a tractor in his garage in his spare time. The point of the education system was to systematize and formalize the process by which young men get resources and network with each other. Relying on individual genius is stifling in the long run, because smart people have to overcome the pedestrian hurdles before they get a product to market.
Wilbur and Orville Wright built the first airplane, but that airplane was much less complex than the Blackbird. They made the first airplane out of a bike shop, but could they have made the blackbird in that same environment?

Education shouldn't be the *only* route, we should create a rich environment for the creative and motivated. Having a pipeline to these institutions, and funding these institutions, gives people more ladders and gets more hands in labs and workshops.

@Griffith but my point wasn't that they could have made a blackbird
my point was that there is not only one way, and you can't just say that "the way we do things now" or "nothing" are the two options.
That's what I meant by it's not possible for me to prove that Locksneed and Bell could have recruited from private edu because we don't have a parallel universe

I mentioned the school doc specifically for that reason because it has comparative information from every source that exists
notably, homeschooled kids do better on basically every metric.

But you could of course nitpick everything I say towards my point and put the weight of the monopoly of public education into the ring, over and over again. I can't really say anything against that.

You can always do that to argue for status quo, doesn't even have to be economics.
In general it's better to understand the underlying mechanisms though and try to estimate from those. And the underlying mechanism that you see everywhere you CAN compare them to free markets,
is government basically sucks ass for efficiency once they don't have any competition. That's why people started losing their jobs massively and became poor once the Soviet Union fell.
If there were 100k governments for you to choose from, all this wouldn't be a problem. But there's like 2, so it is.


regardless, we were on the welfare topic and you gave a different thing to bolster that point. Which is the only reason we are talking about education in the first place.

@WandererUber My question for ancaps is why don't they consider the market demand for government action as a solution to the necessity of collective action and as a solution for tragedies of the commons? Why is there an assumption that the market can do everything and it wouldn't contract out work to the government for tasks it's not up for? Either because it's hard to accumulate capital to tackle certain projects, or because economics aren't the only motivating force in the real world, or because market actors can't work with each other to the degree required to solve certain problems? What if there has to be an actor outside the market who takes certain actions to make sure the market functions? That seems much more in line with my "the government comes first" theory, and it seems more correct.

As for education, I simply find it hard to argue against "they would have figured it out" without giving a mechanism by which they would have figured it out. There's no evidence Lockeheed had a plan to scour the country for geniuses, or that they could have done that without using up all their capital and essentially becoming their own public school system, but they did hire lots of people from top colleges and universities, who plucked people from the hinterland to come work for them. I simply haven't seen an alternative to that model proposed, other than something like that, but private, which begs the question why it's important that it be private and not public.

@Griffith >giving a mechanism by which they would have figured it out.
private education. You don't have to make the government decide what everyone learns and it doesn't do that everywhere.
The government bans the alternative because of "inequality" concerns and this is what it always did post conception of Marxism. They do the same with private enterprise once they get their claws in that.
Many educational institutions were church (whose equation with government I still massively disagree with) or simply private (tutors in antiquity, medieval times, today) and they still produced geniuses and found hidden talents amongst the populace

>There's no evidence Lockeheed had a plan to scour the country for geniuses
I never said they did. The government already had a monopoly on it and this distorts the market and discourages alternatives.
What we CAN show though is that private actors routinely scout universities to pluck candidates. Universities have large private donors by the way. And they get first draft BECAUSE they donate.
So the mechanisms already exists, even WITH public education, and it's worth it.
What is plausible is that private corporations would invest in the gifted programs and offer scholarships more than they do now, if we had (more) private education. This would then lead to an equilibrium where the system as a whole would be scouring the country for geniuses, because there would be more demand for geniuses.
At which point we would have to argue about which system would in the end be more efficient for finding them. I would point to the data that basically anything the government attempts, it's worse at than private enterprise.

>market demand for government action
you have not established this exists. In fact the only time anyone brought up "coercion is the market" that was ME, in a haphazard manner to make an entirely different point, and you rejected this. So you already agree with me that at least what we NOW understand as market-based to mean voluntary. The institution of public schooling was not voluntary in the slightest and this has reared its ugly head multiple times

I'm not gonna go further into detail on the other things because there is good anarcho-capitalist theory on these matters out there, I'm sure you could find it, and I already said I wasn't really interested in relitigating Anarcho-Capitalism in its entirety.
The concepts they introduce are very valuable and they help me to understand economics to this day.
You also conflate the mechanisms and laws of economics with "homo oeconomicus" esque thinking and/or financialization, whatever has you so focused on believing it's about motivations and whatnot. Sounds a bit like "it's not all about making money" but that's not integral to anarcho-capitalist thinking / Austrian economics at all.

>What if there has to be an actor outside the market who takes certain actions to make sure the market functions?
Remains a hypothetical without data to support this. Even if so, this would still not show that government welfare or education produce superior outcomes. My values, personally, would at least expect some indication towards this before I accept that forcing random people to pay for it at gunpoint is acceptable.
The "taxation is theft" rhetoric may be a bit theatrical but the fact it is so extremist makes it more true.

@Griffith I know that my example, which, again, was trying to make an entirely different point, which doesn't matter now, was taken to mean as such by you. So yeah.

The government operates differently from private enterprise and renaming things doesn't do much to make it so. It would fit the tranny world view of the government to call itself that, though.

>Why not criticize the Nazi government?
For what? For education?
I didn't criticize the American government specifically for being the American one, except for that one instance which should have scored at least some points with you if you were being fair. It's a disaster for making people that do stuff, which was your whole point, to bring niggers into the schools. You could have at least been a good sport about this.
My points were about planned economy in general. Education in this case, but it's no difference.