Anonymous asked: If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
I’ve also seen explanations of UBI which I think have some merit, which is just that a janitors salary + UBI is more than UBI which is usually supposed to keep you just above the poverty line, and not much else. So your janitor in a lot of cases would look at the situation and go well, I can quit my job and live just above the poverty line and be okay, but I could also keep working as a janitor and make twice that!
So the really big impact that UBI would make is that people would be more willing to leave jobs where they were being mistreated, or wouldn’t be put in the position of needing multiple jobs to survive.
Okay, this is a slightly different meaning than I thought. My understanding of UBI is “if you make less than $x, UBI will make up the difference,” not “everyone gets UBI in addition to whatever else they make.”
The second interpretation solves some problems, but makes the “where the hell is this money actually coming from” question even harder.
The average person gets a $10,000 UBI and a $10,000 increase in taxes, for a net gain of $0.
The UBI (or a negative income tax, which is a slightly different implementation of the same idea) is phased out gradually, so that you don’t get cliffs with an effective marginal tax rate of 70% or 80%, and so you always earn more money by doing more work. This is hard as hell to do with multiple welfare programs, because you have to coordinate sixty different programs, some of which only apply in some states, and it’s a huge hassle. The simplicity of only having one welfare program to do that with is one of the advantages of UBI.
Or or or or or we could just abolish all the useless and/or outright harmful programs! That way we wouldn’t need to raise taxes that much, if at all, while still being able to give people $10,000. Of course, that’s politically impossible because a lot of those programs buy a massive amount of votes from asshole rentiers, but the US could totally afford to give everyone a “free” $10k a year (compared to the status quo) if it actually tried to solve the problem.
How much do we spend on useless and/or outright harmful programs?
To pay $10k to all residents would require approximately 3.2 trillion.
Department of Health and Human Services spends 1.1 trillion. Healthcare is harmful. The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending. This would free 900B.
990B goes to social security. There are 65M beneficiaries suggesting that if all social security payments were cut by $10k a year on average it would free 650B, for a total of 1.55T so far. This would redistribute from the high-receiving people to the low-receiving people but it’s tax money and a ponzi scheme so it’s totally fair.
Defense is 560B. It’s harmful, lots of pork and inefficiency and cronyism, and then there’s also the “going to other people’s countries and killing them for no good reason” thing. Cut by 300B and nothing of value will have been lost. 1.85T
Department of Agriculture is 150B. Most of it harmful. Cut 120B, especially from subsidies. Farms can live or die on the free market, and poor people deserve to get money instead of food stamps; 1.97T.
Department of Commerce is 10B. Let’s cut it by half. 1.975T
Education is 80B. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Higher education won’t get cheaper by subsidizing it, and children’s education will be affordable with the basic income; remove 65B for 2.04T
Energy is 30B. Let’s say 10B of that is actually easy to cut. 2.05T
DHS is 50B. Kill the evil motherfucker. Cut it all. Reallocate 10B for the not-evil parts from somewhere else, but I just want to see DHS gone. 2.09T
Housing and Urban Development is 30B. Let’s leave them 5B just in case they might have a reason to exist. 2.115T
Department of Interior is small in comparison, at 15B. Cut 5B just because. 2.120T
Department of Labor is 40B. We’re going to drop 35B and downsize it to OSHA, and OSHA alone. OSHA will have its budget multiplied almost 10-fold. 2.155T
Transportation is 80B and produces an oversupply of roads. Roads are harmful. I’m an anarchist, I hate roads. Remove the road moneys of 40B and then there will be no reason for the government to exist. (disclaimer: I’m most likely not serious about that one, only about the number; toll roads paid for by their users are nice) 2.195T
EITC is 70B and its entire point is to be replaced. 2.265T
DOJ needs to end the war on drugs and adopt nordic policies towards prison terms (minimize them), and just cut the fuck out, thus saving 10B for 2.275T
Cut wages of federal employees by 25B to compensate for the free $10k they would be getting; focus especially on the most lucrative (=overpaid) jobs. 2.3T
All in all, we’re only missing 900B from being able to give everyone $10k, and we haven’t even touched state budgets. Since we’re neck-deep in fantasyland already we might as well sail the cutters to the states as well. 20B goes from replacing cash assistance. 150B from removing Medicaid as Harmful. 10B from other forms of social spending. We’re now at 720B. California spends 50B a year on education, which can be cut back somewhat as the basic income extends to children as well (or provides vouchers) and I’ll just assume the other states have enough slack in their budgets to cut a total of 220B from so now we’re at 500B. That’s the equivalent of taking the UBI away from the richest 15% of the country.
If we introduce a gradual phaseout to deal with that part, the average american will lose about $1500 of their $10k. Done. That’s it. No new taxes, other than the phaseout and some shifting from state taxes to federal taxes. A lot of utterly impossible fiscal magic, but it’s ~*~theoretically doable~*~.
Wow, if anything could convince me to be against UBI, it’s this.
Over half of the cuts you’re suggesting come from HHS (which is mostly Medicaid and Medicare) and Social Security. So you’re really talking about huge cuts to programs for the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
In the case of Social Security (which is not a Ponzi Scheme), you’re basically talking about a 1-to-1 replacement - cut out $10,000 per person, and then give everyone a $10,000 basic income. So all else held equal, there’s nothing there to complain about, right?
Except all else isn’t being held equal. Social Security is received by the elderly and by disabled people (not exclusive categories, of course) - groups that have higher-than-average medical costs. But you’re also making huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, meaning that many folks will have to start spending much more of their income on medical care. The net effect is that they’ll be much poorer.
You do say “The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400
billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government
spending.“
The Singapore model is cheaper than the US model for a few reasons. First, because of the strong price controls the Singapore government imposes on the market. We can import that to the US, and it’s a good idea - but I get the sense that most libertarians and anarchists would oppose that idea.
Second, it’s much cheaper in Singapore because only 9% of Singapore’s population is over age 64, compared to 15% of the US population, according to the CIA World Factbook. Fewer old people to treat equals cheaper, but there’s no way to transfer that to the US system. (Nor is there any way to maintain that in Singapore - Singapore’s population is aging, and they won’t be able to sustain their current low levels of health spending).
Third, the Singapore system relies on mandatory health savings accounts, in which (iirc) people are required to put 20% of their income into special accounts that can only be accessed to pay for medical care for themselves or their family members. It works for most people because most people are pretty healthy for most of their lives, so that by the time they get old, or suffer a catastrophic health problem, they have a lot of accrued health savings that they can draw on.
But how do you switch this over to the US? Imagine that Ed was a mover for 45 years, but recently retired - his back can’t take that kind of labor anymore. In fact, he’s going to need a series of back and knee surgeries to be able to remain mobile and not in constant agony. Ed did not spend that whole 45 years putting 20% of his income aside for medical expenses in his old age.
Now we’ve yanked Medicare out from under him, and replaced it with the Singapore system, which assumes people have large savings that can only be used on medical care. How’s Ed going to manage?
Multiply Ed’s problem times hundreds of thousands of people.
Happily, there are much, much better ideas about how to pay for a Universal Basic Income. (I don’t agree with the flat tax idea, but the rest seems like a reasonable approach.)
P.S. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s also the most effective anti-poverty program in US history. But yeah, we should totally throw it away and replace it with a program that’s never actually been tried on any significant scale. No way that could go wrong.
Don’t get me wrong - I favor UBI. But I think it should be phased in gradually, so if it fails we can back out; and I don’t think programs that have been incredibly helpful to millions of low-income people, me included, should be thrown away lightly.
Okay, I think you’re misunderstanding this very badly.
Over half of the cuts you’re suggesting come from HHS (which is mostly Medicaid and Medicare) and Social Security. So you’re really talking about huge cuts to programs for the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
No, I’m talking about huge cuts to programs that often fail to help the elderly, the poor, and the disabled. HHS&SS is a massive money sink and if one doesn’t want to increase taxes for the sake of a demonstration (which I almost succeeded at), one has to cut from where the money is.
In the case of Social Security (which is not a Ponzi Scheme), you’re basically talking about a 1-to-1 replacement - cut out $10,000 per person, and then give everyone a $10,000 basic income. So all else held equal, there’s nothing there to complain about, right?
Except all else isn’t being held equal. Social Security is received by the elderly and by disabled people (not exclusive categories, of course) - groups that have higher-than-average medical costs. But you’re also making huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, meaning that many folks will have to start spending much more of their income on medical care. The net effect is that they’ll be much poorer.
My proposed cuts would increase the incomes of every SS recipient who’s getting less than $10k a year, while reducing the highest incomes. SS has a surprising degree of “not looting citizens to pay massive pensions to rich people” compared to the system in Finland, so there isn’t that much of free-lunchiness there but when it comes to tax money I’m totally going to reallocate it to poor people first.
You do say “The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending.“
That was actually my mistake. It would be $400B in government spending and around $1T in total spending; I had somehow misremembered the “public” numbers as “total” numbers and kept the ratio of public:total constant. Nonetheless, it’s way cheaper than the current system in the US.
The Singapore model is cheaper than the US model for a few reasons. First, because of the strong price controls the Singapore government imposes on the market. We can import that to the US, and it’s a good idea - but I get the sense that most libertarians and anarchists would oppose that idea.
I have no idea why libertarians would oppose an idea that would cut government costs while simultaneously reducing the distortionate effects of its involvement. Most libertarians I know agree that the Singapore system is the best state healthcare system in the world, and some have claimed that the same efficiency could be done with a totally private system as well. A hundred years ago a worker could get healthcare for an entire year at the equivalent of something like $150 in today’s prices before the government stepped in to stop such abominations, and a genuinely competitive market where the supply of doctors isn’t artifically constrained but actually matches demand would make things a lot cheaper.
Second, it’s much cheaper in Singapore because only 9% of Singapore’s population is over age 64, compared to 15% of the US population, according to the CIA World Factbook. Fewer old people to treat equals cheaper, but there’s no way to transfer that to the US system. (Nor is there any way to maintain that in Singapore - Singapore’s population is aging, and they won’t be able to sustain their current low levels of health spending).
The US is also having healthcare costs out of control, and SS costs out of control as well. That’s one reason why I want to privatize-as-in-privacy and deregulate healthcare; to make it both possible and profitable to use all genuine cost-cutting innovations people come up with, so they don’t need to resort to harmful forms of cost-cutting instead.
Third, the Singapore system relies on mandatory health savings accounts, in which (iirc) people are required to put 20% of their income into special accounts that can only be accessed to pay for medical care for themselves or their family members. It works for most people because most people are pretty healthy for most of their lives, so that by the time they get old, or suffer a catastrophic health problem, they have a lot of accrued health savings that they can draw on.
But how do you switch this over to the US? Imagine that Ed was a mover for 45 years, but recently retired - his back can’t take that kind of labor anymore. In fact, he’s going to need a series of back and knee surgeries to be able to remain mobile and not in constant agony. Ed did not spend that whole 45 years putting 20% of his income aside for medical expenses in his old age.
Now we’ve yanked Medicare out from under him, and replaced it with the Singapore system, which assumes people have large savings that can only be used on medical care. How’s Ed going to manage?
Multiply Ed’s problem times hundreds of thousands of people.
US surgeries are obscenely expensive. The system allows everyone to pass their costs to everyone else, which they promptly do. Furthermore, Singapore has a public catastrophic insurance precisely for people like Ed who have large bills they can’t pay. The big difference is in making people pay for their healthcare so they will ration their usage vs. making everyone else pay for everyone’s healthcare without even price controls intervening (downwards, that is; there are plenty of government interventions making healthcare artificially expensive). Western Europe is using “make everyone pay for everyone, but at least try to keep prices in check” and it’s better, but why settle for better when one could have the best?
And regardless, even though my calculations were incorrect, the UBI phaseout (or, in other words, income tax hike for honesty) could be increased to compensate for that. Doubling it so that the average american gets “only” $7000 more a year would provide enough money to give Singaporean healthcare to every single Ed.
Happily, there are much, much better ideas about how to pay for a Universal Basic Income. (I don’t agree with the flat tax idea, but the rest seems like a reasonable approach.)
While the link has merits, some parts of it are ridiculous. Payroll taxes are the same as income taxes, they are just hidden which is disingenuous and terrible; thus the actual income tax wouldn’t be 17% but instead 30%. Doesn’t matter that much though, as I’d totally do the same flattening of income taxes, just making them transparent instead of hiding a part in payroll taxes (seriously, this is something I will never understand of the non-hard left; why do people believe “employer pays x% of your wages” is not away from your wages? At least marxists understand it through the concept of surplus value.); and the UBI phaseout would be effectively a tax increase, I just called it by a different name to demonstrate that every taxpayer would be getting more money than they currently do.
By adding a 10% VAT one cuts everyone’s purchasing power by 10%, which is the equivalent of taking away 10% of their income. It’s not that hard. Thus the total tax is at ~40% and people are effectively getting only $900 a month’s worth because everything will be more expensive. No way around it. Still better than Finland or current US though.
(Finland is ridiculous and evil. We pay 24% VAT on most things meaning that in the US I’m like “omfg how is everything so cheap here” (except fucking healthcare, but I’ve got a nice insurance trick that gets me free-as-in-no-copays healthcare in the US for only $60 a year); then we have a 25% effective payroll tax for pensions which one is technically not allowed to opt out of (but I know a way to do it anyway because fuck that, I’m not going to get anything out of it so why should I subsidize some conservative baby boomer asshole’s tax evasion sangria in Portugal (if you’re living large on my taxes at least pay your own fucking share)), and then we have regular income tax which goes up to 50% when counting national and municipal taxes; if I made $100k a year in Finland I’d pay effectively $65k in various taxes (if I didn’t evade them, obviously; with a couple of legal tricks I could cut it down to $45k and that would make me an evil deadbeat bourgie who’s avoiding their responsibility, and I’m a person who finds “Work harder, millions of people on welfare depend on you!” sincerely inspirational).
Carbon taxes are neat, and I’d totally implement a big revenue-neutral carbon tax in my model to reduce other taxes (ideally replacing income taxes with something like the FairTax, although that would require adjusting the UBI upwards to compensate for the tax). Financial transaction taxes I don’t know about, as some people I trust to have a clue say they are terrible and others say they are good, so I’ll default to “no”.
So if I were to revise my model, it would feature a universal tax equal to something around 30% with no hidden components, correction for the healthcare miscalculation, and a slight adjustment to the SS cuts so people would have less cause to whine (perhaps making it so that everyone’s SS payments are cut by $8k so all recipients would gain $2k a year or more) combined with abolition of the mandatory pension system.
P.S. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s also the most effective anti-poverty program in US history. But yeah, we should totally throw it away and replace it with a program that’s never actually been tried on any significant scale. No way that could go wrong.
Social security is a ponzi scheme in the sense that it’s a clever way of early adopters to loot latecomers. Don’t get me wrong, I think Bitcoin is totally a ponzi scheme in some ways too, yet I like Bitcoin.
Objectively, the amount current pensioners have paid to SS is way less than they are getting out of it, when compared to what current young people would end up paying and receiving. There’s no way around it. Finland has a similar system and I’m very familiar with how it works and it’s totally a Ponzi scheme that enrichens baby boomers at the cost of my generation. (The system in Finland is a lot worse in that aspect, but the basic nature of PAYG schemes is the same.) When the argument for “it’s not a ponzi” relies on “Private sector Ponzi schemes are also vulnerable to collapse because they cannot compel new entrants, whereas participation in the Social Security program is a condition for joining the U.S. labor force.” I think it’s pretty fair to say that it has very significant ponzi-like characteristics. Or alternatively I could say that it’s just a tool old people use to loot young people. As far as such tools go, it’s amazingly non-terrible as it doesn’t pay rich people obscene pensions (Microsoft’s Elop will be entitled to way more finnish pension moneys from his short tenure at Nokia than a poor person who’s worked their entire life could ever get), but it’s still an unsustainable system whose taxes have been increased massively over time to keep up with the promises.
Also, I find it kind of funny that you say “we’ve been giving a certain amount of money to some people, which has reduced poverty, but we shouldn’t take the risky step of giving a certain amount of money to all people because who knows what would happen”
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
Don’t get me wrong - I favor UBI. But I think it should be phased in gradually, so if it fails we can back out; and I don’t think programs that have been incredibly helpful to millions of low-income people, me included, should be thrown away lightly.
I’ve lived several years on “programs that have been incredibly helpful to low-income people” and I’d throw them away very lightly if I got the chance to implement UBI instead.
Once when I had to deposit cash to my bank account while being on the equivalent of TANF, I didn’t do it directly because they would’ve reduced my welfare as it would’ve been “income” (they scrutinize bank statements to see how much people “deserve”) but I instead bought some expensive prescription drugs I didn’t need and told them to refund those to my bank account.
And then when I hit my copayment cap on prescription drugs earlier than I would otherwise have I received that money back a second time later that year.
And in theory one could even sell the drugs to make one’s money back a third time, but I didn’t do that.
Such programs are mostly harmful, they result in utterly perverted and distorted incentives that lead to such ridiculous tricks being the best option, and they waste huge amounts of tax money and create massive incentive traps that ensure people can’t improve their situation. Money is the unit of caring; if you care about people, give them money so they can afford what they need and that’s it, most of everything else is harmful. (bednets are an outlier adn should not be counted)
It is estimated that Africa imports nearly 83 per cent of its food. African leaders are seeking ways to feed their peoples and become players in the global economy.
In the second edition of The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, I argue that Africa can feed itself in a generation. However, efforts to achieve such an ambitious goal continue to be frustrated by policies adopted by Africa’s historical trading partners, especially the European Union.
There are at least three ways in which EU policies affect Africa’s ability to address its agricultural and food challenges: tariff escalation; technological innovation and food export preferences.
African leaders would like to escape the colonial trap of being viewed simply as raw material exporters. But their efforts to add value to the materials continue to be frustrated by existing EU policies.
Take the example of coffee. In 2014 Africa —the home of coffee— earned nearly $2.4 billion from the crop. Germany, a leading processor, earned about $3.8 billion from coffee re-exports.
The concern is not that Germany benefits from processing coffee. It is that Africa is punished by EU tariff barriers for doing so. Non-decaffeinated green coffee is exempt from the charges. However, a 7.5 per cent charge is imposed on roasted coffee. As a result, the bulk of Africa’s export to the EU is unroasted green coffee.
The charge on cocoa is even more debilitating. It is reported that the “EU charges (a tariff) of 30 per cent for processed cocoa products like chocolate bars or cocoa powder, and 60 per cent for some other refined products containing cocoa.”
The impact of such charges goes well beyond lost export opportunities. They suppress technological innovation and industrial development among African countries. The practice denies the continent the ability to acquire, adopt and diffuse technologies used in food processing. It explains to some extent the low level of investment in Africa’s food processing enterprises.
The EU is an evil empire, government aroundfucking in the economy hurts some of the worst-off people in the world, and rich hippies are ruining everything; news at eleven.
“Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
“Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
Unprincipled stances on taxation:
“You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
“Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
Tag yrself I’m a principled consequentialist.
This is… So silly. If the consequentialist position sounds wildly different from the “unprincipled capitalist” position then you really need to choose a completely different word than “theft” in all of the above, because you’re COMPLETELY failing to express what you’re trying to say by it.
There are important differences in the behavior of politicians who believe the one compared to politicians who believe the other.
One approach realizes that when you tax people, you hurt people. When you have the power to impose VAT on food items while children go hungry to bed, you have the power to hurt people. That is a grave responsibility, and should only be exercised when your taxation scheme helps people more than it hurts starving children.
The other approach, which I see too often, goes
Lol I want to signal that I am cultured, let’s fund the Royal Theatre by taxing important goods! Wait, there are starving kids in our country now how did that happen? Let’s tax luxury goods to help the kids. Poor alcoholics can no longer afford homes? Let’s tax cars exorbitantly. People die because they don’t replace old cars that don’t have the newest safety features? Let’s make those mandatory! Poor people can no longer afford to drive at all now? Well sucks to be poor I guess but cars aren’t a necessity.
What, you feel taxes are unjust? They’re the price you pay to live in civilization! Without them we wouldn’t have great things like the Royal Theatre but only the art that people like enough to pay money for without being forced to and that would be terrible.
I realize this isn’t primarily about mandatory art, but nonetheless mandatory art is the worst.
ugh that thing
that exact thing
one politician around here (from the Party Formerly Known as the Communist Party) has written an excellent piece on how “criminal law isn’t a list of facebook likes” and I just want to live somewhere where the government budget isn’t treated as a list of facebook likes either
“It’s time to put the politics aside/stop shouting/grow up and get to the hard work of Solving Problems TM.”
Yeah, except the reason you can’t get to “solving” “problems” is that people can’t even agree on what values should underlie those solutions, what the problems even are, what means are acceptable as solutions, and so on. It’s like they pretend their solutions are obvious and their opponents agree but are being petty for no reason.
YES. This. It is so hard to have a conversation with someone about solving a problem when no one notices that they have drastically different ideas about how the world works.
*cough* minimum wage *cough cough*
#endorsed
this is why I always always try to get people to define their terms when it comes to values and consequences
It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.
This is a bizarre criticism to me.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.
In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.
But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.
I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.
(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).
But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.
To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.
Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.
Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.
I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.
Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.
Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.
And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).
Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.
State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.
So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.
Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.
The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.
The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.
The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.
Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.
But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.
For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.
So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.
And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.
Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).
Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.
Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.
But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.
okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy
i do actually think a communist revolution in Japan or Australia would increase life expectancy- primarily because of free housing and the consequent end of homelessness. Plus the proposed platform of the Japanese Communist Party seems to me to be preferable to the policy of the current Japanese government.
Momentum is building for ending homelessness by giving people homes, there has already been a trial program in Melbourne with promising results.
It’s based on cost reduction instead of ideology, but what can you do.
Are there empty homes in Australia/Japan that could be given to the homeless? “Free housing” kind of requires there to be housing to give away freely and if the housing market is a free market,* then the price of housing already accurately reflects how much is available.
If they’re not giving homes away for almost free, then: There are fewer homes than are demanded or there is a market intervention that makes it bad business to earn a dollar by selling a $4 home for $5.
(My guess is: “Both.”)
My actual guess is: There are probably empty homes available for very cheap, but they’re far away from urban centers where the homeless want to be. All the homes near urban centers are either already lived in or very temporarily empty and giving the temporarily empty to the homeless just means the people who would have bought them e.g. when moving to the city to pursue their career now cannot buy that home.
This is definitely a problem locally - we have (rounded numbers) 2.5 million homes for 5 million people, that is, 1 home for every two people. The average family is 4 people. That is: We have more than enough homes, I could buy a house for less than a single years wage. A shitty house far from everywhere I want to be, but I can. Instituting communism would not solve our homelessness problem because our homelessness problem is caused by the fact that our homeless would rather be homeless than live in their assigned homes, far from their community of fellow homeless. Where they want to be is in the city centers, and no amount of communism will make land value in the city center go down, it will, at most, make it illegal to make housing decisions based on land value (Hint: this is a terrible idea.)
*hahaha i slay :(
Technically there are plenty of empty homes in the city centre, although these tend to be expensive apartments being held by investors.
Homelessness is typically an intersection of various mental health conditions that make it difficult to hold a job or even access welfare payments, thus making it impossible to rent accommodation. It turns out that insisting people solve this before giving them access to housing doesn’t work well, and that putting people in secure homes makes it a lot easier to manage whatever it was that was messing them up in the first place, creating a self-sustaining system.
Apparently this has been tried in Utah to good effect, although I don’t know much about that.
I mean yes there can be various instances of market failure in allocating new housing, but that is not the major issue when homelessness is considered.
Technically there are plenty of empty homes in the city centre, although these tend to be expensive apartments being held by investors.
That would be:
or there is a market intervention that makes it bad business to earn a dollar by selling a $4 home for $5.
Specifically, it is the market intervention that you’re not allowed to kick people out with a days notice. Those investment companies would love to rent those apartments out for any dollar amount higher than the maintenance cost of renting them out, but that makes them harder to sell because they cannot kick out the renters if the new owner doesn’t want them.
But yes absolutely, there are more, other issues than “homes in city centers are expensive for a reason.” That’s just the first, most obvious issue.
Humorous anecdote time:
I remember a day ~10 years ago when I was still a student. I lived in 36 square meters for approximately USD 600.
I received an offer from an alcoholic I met at the train station - he’d rent out his ~80 m2 apartment to me for $300, because it was an apartment assigned to him by the state - that is, for free - in a city he didn’t want to live in. He’d rather go be homeless in the capital with an income of my $300 than stay in this city where he didn’t know anybody and had nothing to do but drink alone and chat with strangers on the train station. Solving his problem wouldn’t take free housing - he had that - it would take “free housing in the location where he wanted,” which, pro-tip, is also where everybody else wants to live so good luck with that.
I didn’t take his offer, but say that I did. I guess the market value of his apartment rent was probably around $800 or so, we’ll go with 800 for easy math. That means that the state pays $800 to him. He then gives $800 worth of housing to me, in return for $300 from me.
In an attempt to solve the homelessness problem, the state has spent $800 to give me, the son of wealthy parents, $500 worth of housing subsidies and him, the alcoholic, $300 drinking money to spend while homeless. A++ governance, vote Communist for more economic efficiencya solution to the housing crisis.
I swear, my anarchist sentiments are not from fuck-you-got-mine, they’re from the fact that the state actively ruins value. Close all services and subsidies, Universal Basic Income starts today.
I swear, my anarchist sentiments are not from fuck-you-got-mine, they’re from the fact that the state actively ruins value. Close all services and subsidies, Universal Basic Income starts today.
Nordic anarcho-welfarists roll call, #2 reporting in!
Also, is there a name for the phenomenon where governmnent attempts to address individual discrimination (such as the landlord kicking out perfectly nice tenants because they don’t like their face) end up creating systematic discrimination instead (such as landlords refusing to take tenants from certain marginalized groups because they don’t want to bear the risk of getting a shitty tenant they can’t kick out)?
It’s sort of funny how, contra the anti-capitalists, the two sectors that are currently threatening to eat up the economy are healthcare and higher education, both of which are heavily regulated, and primarily administered by non-profit organizations.
I too would like to tax these sectors, reduce their subsidies, and redirect the savings towards a basic income program.
I love how politically unworkable this plan is
I note that university professors and health insurance administrators are not on that graph :)
…or we could just privatize-mutualize them, deregulate heavily, withdraw government funding (except maybe replace healthcare with the Singaporean system), put ~all the moneys~ in UBI, and let the free market eat the rentseekers…
Fun fact: the public sector in the US is exactly the same size as it is in Finland when ignoring military (and bigger when guns are accounted for; the US is just richer so the public sector appears smaller), so the idea of abolishing all public services and transfers and programs and corporate welfares and other things and replacing them with a $15k UBI for everyone (or split into a $6k UBI and $9k service voucher for children, for things like school, daycare etc.; the public school system of Finland costs that much and is famous so we already know one can afford quality schooling for that price) would technically be completely possible. Without a single cent in new taxes.
Homelessness? Lolnope, that extra $15k is enough to pay rent almost everywhere.
Poor families? A single parent of three would get $33k and not be penalized at all for working, while any childcare costing less than $9k a year would be effectively free (and with proper deregulation, it could be done; all it takes is for a bunch of parents to pool together so that one person takes care of four children to earn a respectable income from it)
Rural poverty? With this massive cash injection the demand for services would skyrocket and create jobs. Actual jobs, not bullshit make-work.
And speaking of bullshit jobs, yeah, they’d be going away. Nobody entitled to this UBI would willingly subject themselves to the inhumane treatment some employers are able to demand.
Jobs getting outsourced? Still have that UBI which is enough to give one, when supplemented with some earned income (remember the absurdly low marginal tax rates because this wouldn’t need new taxes and thus the pretty much absolute abolition of incentive traps), quite a degree of freedom in creating meaning in one’s life.
And because this would be revenue-neutral, one could replace the current tax system with a universal flat consumption tax of quite a reasonable size (and by “reasonable” I mean “low”), combined with a land-value tax to fix cities, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax to fix global warming (or one could privatize-mutualize the atmosphere for the same results; privatizing-mutualizing aquifers and other such commons is a pretty obvious source of extra income as well)
Combine this with ending the war on drugs and not starting any new wars on anything, abolishing the NSA and banning the state from ever again having one, and opening the borders completely but only gradually phasing in the UBI for immigrants and you have my policy platform for the 2020 presidential race.
now if you don’t mind I need to have all the freaking drinks and take all the drugs because as rational economic actors I’d suspect about 200 million americans would directly benefit from this plan and by “rational economic actors” I mean “haha never going to happen”
but it totally could, without a single extra cent in taxes; that’s why I shall have to intoxicate myself thoroughly
Large portions of our economy would grind to a halt [sic] if the government did not grant patents and copyrights. Without this massive intervention into the free market, the drug, music, publishing, and software industries could not exist. [sic] Bill Gates likes to think of himself as a self-made man, but he would not be one of the richest men in the world if the government did not make it illegal for anyone but Microsoft to copy and sell Windows. [implication: this is somehow supposed to be a “good” thing]
We can see this in their findings summarized in Table 1. Both public and private service providers received consistently high scores from people who had recently used their services. On a scale of 0-100, the public agencies averaged a score of 73.5 for customer satisfaction, while the private businesses averaged 73.9 – a negligible difference. Clearly, people’s actual experiences and evaluations of public agencies runs directly contrary [sic] to the negative stereotype that government organizations consistently provide inferior service to that available in the private sector.
Service Ratings by Recent Customers
U.S. Postal Service 76.1
Public health clinics 74.4
(...)
Private mail carriers 84.5
Private doctors' offices 80.6
Government also helps you own your house in more than the legal sense. On a more practical level, the federal government actually gives you money every year to help pay for your house. It’s called a mortgage interest tax deduction and it is one of the larger benefit programs run by the federal government – amounting to over $60 billion dollars a year. You can also deduct any real estate taxes you pay. These largely overlooked subsidy programs have enabled millions of people to buy their first home or to move up to a larger home than they could afford otherwise. [but when the private sector does it, it’s called irresponsible]
How could [anti-poverty programs] possibly be considered a success [sic] when the poverty rate is essentially the same as it was thirty years ago? The answer is that most of the policies aimed at the poor in the U.S. were never intended to get them out of poverty.
One business sector that benefits tremendously from government R&D is the drug industry. Our government conducts fully half of the research and development of new drugs – the economic benefits of which are then largely captured by pharmaceutical companies. [once again, this is supposed to be a “good” thing]
I think it’s a rite of passage or something around here when one starts to outgroup “progressives”…for a good reason.
And in a linked article:
Naturally, some conservatives see Plan Bay Area as part of the broader, Soviet-style plot to urbanize America. “The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike,” wrote Stanley Kurtz in National Review, “turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now.
*me, in the corner, drooling*
Yes, this is an excellent evil plot. Moar of this excellent evil sovietness please. Fill the Bay with commieblocks! The rule of the game is we all are the same and my blocks must create unbroken rows!
1. There are certain services and infrastructure required to have the sort of modern conditions that Westerners typically expect from their countries.
2. To not use those services/infrastructure you’d basically have to go live like the Amish, and that’s a best-case scenario.
3. If it wasn’t the government providing that services and infrastructure, it would just be private companies instead.
4. Those services and infrastructure cost labor and resources to perform/create/maintain.
5. Ergo any organization providing the services and infrastructure needs to be able to procure the necessary labor and resources.
6. If a private company provided those things instead of the government, it would almost certainly use money to procure the labor and resources and then demand payment for the resulting services and infrastructure, which would be identical to how the government procures using money and expects payment in the form of taxes.
6.5. In fact, it would probably cost you more money to get the services from the private company, since you’d be a captive audience, and a company would want to make a profit, and you would be less able to hold them accountable for bad service than you can government officials, since opting out would either be impossible or cause you great hardship. See for example: The US commercial internet providers and the outrageous prices and bad service they provide because they hold a monopoly over the proceedings, and how municipal internet is often better and cheaper.
7. If we instead provided the labor and resources via everyone making regular donations/volunteering in the required amounts, you’d essentially end up with a less-efficient tax system.
So when we consider all of the above, there is literally no way it makes logical and self-consistent sense to claim “taxes are theft” unless you think everyoneboth private worker or public worker is obligated to provide you with everything for free.
And then you run into logical problems anyway, because there’s no way in hell any organization can procure enough resources to provide you with free services without soliciting so many donations that you, like I said, effectively end up recreating the tax system less efficiently anyway.
(You’d also run into social problems, since there’s obviously no way in hell any business is going to accept the attitude that they’re obligated to give you free stuff.)
So the ancaps/libertarians/economic conservatives can stop projecting their own stupidity, insanity, and inability to understand basic economics onto everyone else, thanks.
If only the government stuck to providing those services, instead of shoving all kinds of “services” down my throat just because other people have decided I must have them.
Those vital services and infrastructure are a relatively small fraction of the total taxation. I wouldn’t object to them, what I object to is tax money being spent on kidnapping, ransom, and other kinds of banditry upon (mostly poor and black) people who are just trying to make ends meet in the totally legitimate businesses of sex work, drug dealing and braiding hair; tax money being used to “create jobs” for people in illegitimate businesses such as privatized prisons; tax money being spent on delivering barrels of pork to politically connected cronies; tax money being used to dictate my food in the form of agricultural subsidies; tax money being used to subsidize inefficient infrastructure in non-toll highways, fossil fuels and fucking alfalfa farming in fucking California; tax money being used to murder people whose only crime was being muslim in a region where some people are bad guys; tax money being used to prop up a bloated imperialist military that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources due to political gridlock; tax money being used to paternalize, degrade and humiliate poor people as a condition for being allowed to exist; tax money being used to prop up the privileges of the already privileged; tax money being used to keep brown people out and unable to make a honest living in a place where they want to make it, etc…
I would never pay a private company for about half of the things the government does, but thanks to the idea of democratic legitimacy combined with the inherent monopolies/oligopolies (at best) of states, I don’t have a choice.
I wouldn’t mind paying taxes to fund a sufficient basic income to somewhat consensualize the economy, provide basic (genuine) security for everyone, internalize externalities, handle natural monopolies, and do the important investments the private sector is bad at doing (basic science, basic healthcare research etc.) and [the things I’ve forgotten to mention but belong here]; especially if taxed from economically efficient sources like land, usage of natural resources (”privatize” the aquifers and the atmosphere, sell the water/pollution rights to the highest bidders and share the profits to everyone to solve so many problems simultaneously!) and the government’s services (there’s an argument to be made that since the police and military ultimately protect mostly property, the owners of said property should be the ones who pay for the system that protects them from people who would rather see the property in their own possession), etc.
Everything else is waste though, robbed at gunpoint (indirectly; I pay my taxes without guns being involved because I don’t want to get guns involved but the threat of violence is always upholding all state actions and that’s why we don’t do state actions except where it’s actually genuinely necessary and important) without consent. Those I am well within my moral rights to protest.
PS. Can we agree on a compromise that taxation is theft the same way property is?
(Also seriously, the war on drugs is basically such a perfect example of how utterly fucked-up the state is. It robs taxpayers so it can give money to people whose job it is to basically kidnap black men who do something some other people don’t like even if they hurt nobody in doing it, and deliver them to other people who are paid to hold black men in captivity, because the ~democracy~ has decided that such things are right and just and proper. Then when marijuana is legalized the state regulates it so that poor black people can’t make a legal and legitimate living off it because barriers to entry shut them outside the business.)
The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.
And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.
And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.
This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.
Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.
Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.
And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.
If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).
But in practice left-libertarianism seems to be basically an economic equivalent of the people grousing about the evils of foreigners who admit when asked that they think anyone who wants to work in the country should be allowed to; people whose action’s consequences are wildly different to what they claim to want, but who don’t think about that or act differently because they don’t have to live with those consequences. And I think it maintains the presence of a lot of harm in much the same way.
(I’m only talking about my own libertarianism, not claiming that others’ views would be the same)
The part of this, and the part of left-libertarianism that kind of alarms me is that when you call for government service/activity reduction in general, taxation reduction in response to the illegitimatisation of taxation, etc, people move to satisfy that in the easiest possible way.
And the easiest possible way isn’t to get rid of any of those problems, because there’s pretty solid incentive systems keeping them in place. The easiest way to reduce governmental action/taxation is to reduce the *useful* services that are only there because the electorate want them to be. So, the dismantling of welfare and support systems.
I think a big part of this is the way the right has a stranglehold on downsizing the state. Deregulatory capture happens because left-statists are too much in love with the state so the only ones willing to make it smaller are disproportionately on the right, and thus deregulation is done on the right’s terms.
There’s also this idea that there are two kinds of services: the bad ones, and the popular ones. A lot of what the electorate wants is terrible, and pork delivers votes reliably. One could take this fatalistic approach all the way, and conclude that what happens will happen anyway (in which case there would be no need to do left-statist advocacy for not downsizing), or try to find ways around it.
And as near as I can tell left-libertarian political strategy right now is to just ignore that problem and keep hammering away at the useful services, so that when they’ve killed them all they can get at the bad bits they don’t like, while saying that in their heart of hearts what they really want is to affect the other stuff. It’s not really distinguishable from right-libertarian strategy, just pursued for different reasons.
This also often turns good services into bad ones in the process.
Narrowing services generally means adding a lot more bureaucracy to manage eligibility and calculate what is owed, and running more narrower services instead of one broad one. Welfare systems which do cash handouts in a broader rather than narrower way take more taxes. Welfare systems which use taper to avoid perverse incentives take more taxes. A basic income runs more yet through the tax system.
#notmylibertarianism
Narrowing services may make the state superficially smaller when measured in money, but it also makes it a lot more intrusive. A decently-sized basic income with a flat 40% marginal tax rate (or even better, no income tax at all, but simply taxing land, resources, consumption and pollution etc.) is superficially more expensive than a horrible bloated bureaucracy delivering a million different programs to people who pass the checks, but in reality it “governs” and distorts the economy far less (which is the *real* problem with taxes; if we could have a 90% tax rate which delivered exactly the things that “should” be delivered it would not be a problem at all, but because the state can’t allocate most things as well as the market, it’s better to just give people money/not take away too much of their money).
Campaigns for lower taxes and reduced services to “where really needed” take these off the table and replace them with a dozen or more broken ugly systems eligible for a handful of people each that require a lawyer to navigate, developed and implemented and operated by people who can’t get jobs in the private sector. The state of the American welfare system compared to European ones is the crowning achievement of the campaign for the illiegitimacy of tax and wouldn’t have been possible without the kind help of left-libertarians.
As an ex-recipient of european welfare, I can say that your view of this continent’s ability to be horrible and degrading to poor people is an underestimate. Left-libertarianism is basically unheard-of here, yet the system still sucks for poor people.
And cutting taxes also incentivises finding alternative revenue streams. The prison phones problem, civil forfeiture by random police acting as raiders on the road, those are specific to America not in spite of, but *because* of attitudes regarding taxation as illegitimate and preferring that local services find alternative ways to be self-funding. The sensible solution here is to just pay from general taxation and not permit self-funding; any fees levied go into the whole state’s pot. The left-libertarian strategy is to double-down on shrinking general taxation. It’d work, eventually, but you’d have to kill the rest of the state first, and thankfully people aren’t going to let you do that.
That’s not libertarianism. That’s banditry. Cops should not be authorized to rob and kidnap citizens. This is non-negotiable. Incentive systems that enable robbing and kidnapping citizens violate people’s autonomy and basic rights and this is economic conservatism combined with unchallenged state authority.
If I were running the prisons, I’d do it the nordic way because it’s so much better in every way. Short sentences, minimize the harm to everyone instead of looting the coffers of the public to lock other parts of the public to satisfy the rest of the public. The american “justice” system is exactly the kind of a travesty that unrestrained democracy produces; two wolves and a sheep (guess the color) voting on what to have for dinner.
Compare that with the cost-effective, freedom-preserving nordic system which gives no fucks about what the public thinks because screw democracy, we’re doing what works, and we don’t let the mob vote on judges and prosecutors and what the fuck, but simply install them based on competence and tell them to try to keep the prisons empty. One of these systems respects people’s freedom, another sacrifices their liberty to the whims of the vox populi; the fact that the superior system is also cheaper to the taxpayer is a nice bonus. There are other kinds of freedom than just economic freedom.
(And if I were to privatize prisons altogether, I think it’s rather obvious that it’s the prisoners who are the customers and who get to choose which prison they want to spend time in, if they need to be imprisoned at all. Assuming such thorough abolition of the state (which I don’t necessarily support) the natural system would be that people sign to a security provider, which then negotiates with others’ security providers and delivers justice to its own members. The Black Panthers would probably do a much better job protecting black people than the cops of Ferguson; and if I were a shopkeeper dealing with a cigarette theft I’d be a lot more comfortable handing the teenage miscreant to them, instead of bandits whose loyalties lie with white savages with no concern for the actual welfare of the people their actions affect. Fucking yay democracy!)
If left-libertarianism focused on actually trying to dismantle specifically the bad things, a focus which can’t be satisfied by dismantling welfare instead, that’d be awesome. If it was a project to create a vastly simpler system to accomplish the things regulation is supposed to be for, which I think would be possible from a gods-eye view at least, that’d be awesome too, although people wildly overestimate how easy it is and some of their criteria are not very good (e.g. verbose specific rules rather than brief broad rules are often preferable because they can provide companies with much less uncertainty as to whether their investments are okay or not, so you probably don’t want it to be *too* brief).
I don’t want to dismantle welfare, I want to radically simplify it so that instead of the unholy bloated festering mess we have now, we’d simply give money to people who don’t have enough money, defined with the amazingly simple method of giving everyone money and taking back some of their income and letting the market, aka. poor people themselves, decide what the poor really need.
And instead of establishing an unholy bloated festering mess of subsidies, ill-considered efficiency standards, terrible regulations, and cap-and-trade aka. delivering windfall profits to cronies, I want to prevent global warming with the amazingly simple method of putting a price on greenhouse emissions and letting the market, aka. people who actually know whether implementation X is a good idea or not, decide how to cut emissions.
And instead of regulating the number of taxis and pharmacies (yes, the number of pharmacies is centrally planned in Finland), or mandating that housing must screw over the poor to subsidize car-owning families with parking requirements and mean apartment size regulations (yes, in Finland there are rules that condominiums must build more parking spots and big apartments that the market would deliver on its own, effectively redistributing upwards by making rich people’s housing artificially cheaper at the expense of poor people’s smaller apartments and non-car-owningness; and then builders evade the regulations by building one huge useless apartment so the rest can be smaller and that’s why the top floor of every other building in Finland has a square footage georg that should not be counted), etc. I want the state to simply fucking not do such things, with the amazingly simple method of just fucking not doing it.
And instead of having the state regulate my gender, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of regulating relationships and voting on whether or not gay and poly marriage is okay, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of deciding what substances people are allowed to put into their bodies and in which situations and kidnapping those who don’t obey, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of having the state decide what terms I may sell my labor with, or to be more specific it’s not even the state but the employers’ union (yes, we do have an employers’ union) negotiating with the labor unions but this is corporatism and they are an accessory of the state, it could just fucking not do it. Instead of trying to “create jobs” and looting Peter to pay Paul to push paper instead of creating value, it could just fucking not do it.
Over half of what the state currently does can be solved with two amazingly simple heuristics:
1. Just fucking don’t do it
2. Give cash to everyone instead so they can buy it if they really want it
and the corollary
3. Always prefer the simpler and more general option with less loopholes and less risk of terrible side-effects to poor people: give money instead of services unless you’re really exceptionally certain that this one service is worth it; regulate instead of banning, or just don’t; tax instead of regulating, or just don’t; tax generarly and broadly and avoid specificity because people are smart and will find ridiculous ways around your bullshit; let the market sort itself out; just fucking trust the market don’t fuck with it; if you think the market is screwing over the poor don’t fuck with the market just give the poor more money so they can afford to vote with their feet/wallets; and never ever let anyone do anything that would make someone say “vote for X because they care about the interests of group Y”
