121–130 of 166 posts
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Fire, tenacity, and willpower for... what, exactly? Towards what end? Why should everyone have to play ubermensch just to survive?
Because that's how nature works? Because it's naive to think we've evolved so far that we are no longer subject to natural forces and evolutionary history?
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They don't deserve to take someone else's money by force, in order to pay for those things. I don't think opposing forced income redistribution puts me on the side of history.
And you're internalizing "take someone else's money by force". This really goes back to Americans being temporarily embarrassed capitalists, regardless their real financial livelihood. And working-class thinks that we're talking about them when it comes to "We're gonna take their money" - We are, some. But we're also going to provide a baseline for everyone no matter what. > I don't think opposing forced income redis…
By taking other people's income? I don't think that's fair.
>Because people who are rich did not do so themselves in a little bubble. Their successes rest in part on all of us.
That doesn't seem like a scientific way to determine how much one owes another person. In my opinion it's not consistent with the principle of justice. It's a very sweeping generalization.
>People can still thrive and profit - they just won't be able to stand on our backs for them to get ahead.
How would they be standing on our backs in the absence of forcible redistribution?
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Because that's how nature works? Because it's naive to think we've evolved so far that we are no longer subject to natural forces and evolutionary history?
The minute we collectively stopped stronger folks than you and me from beating us up and taking our stuff, we left the realm of "how nature works". In the west, we're all living in rich enough countries that no one should need superhuman will or fire or tenacity simply to live a decent life. No one willing to work 40 hours a week should be denied access to the medical care system, face food or housing insecurity, etc…
Quite often that's the problem. Particularly if we've built up a palace of perverse incentives that make it a better strategy to coast along on the byzantine web of social services that is effectively an inefficient Basic Income for people at the bottom of the pile, than it is to get a shitty job and make just enough money to lose all those benefits.
I can't really blame people that realize that that's the situation they face, though.
Midway down the author mentions a study that showed most Americans object to "unfairness" rather than "inequality". I've found this to be the case for me personally. If someone tries hard, works diligently, and makes smart decisions, but are still living in poverty, I want to help them. No hardworking, disciplined, motivated person should live in poverty, or have trouble making ends meet, in my opinion. Unfortunately…
The alternative is that they lack motivation because their lives are exhausting and debilitating. Maybe that sounds paradoxical, but there are at least a handful of studies (with a quick Googling, e.g. [0] [1]) which suggest being poor is a massive stressor that has an impact on mental and physical health. When someone has no money and no clear path for advancement in life, it's not hard to see why they might want to escape with games or movies or drugs. That won't make their long term situation better, but its something small they can control and feel good about in an otherwise bleak and chaotic world.
It's also the case that people who've experienced success from working hard will have more motivation than those who haven't succeeded. To the latter group, the formula for success is theoretical rather than a lived experience--they haven't had positive reinforcement for past efforts so they're less motivated to try again in the future, even if that's suboptimal in their abstract model of the world.
So ultimately, yes, a lot of poverty is the result of bad decisions, but that's an incomplete picture of the death spiral of poverty where a lack of money and options creates a mindset that encourages those decisions.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i-right/201210/the-e...
[1] http://www.urban.org/urban-wire/povertys-toll-mental-health
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No, you don't welcome a rigorous discussion. You want to repeat discussions we've already had, in which you were not persuaded to others' points of view, and you didn't persuade them either. The likelihood that we'll all see the divine light of von Mises and convert this time is extraordinarily low. Stop trying.
I'm expressing my views. It's not constructive to tell people with minority viewpoints to stop expressing them. I did nothing more than what the parent comment did. I also don't think we're in a position to judge the full impact of our words on others, so I don't accept your assessment that no minds were changed by the previous discussions.
Nobody's telling you not to express your view. The obnoxious thing is to snidely pretend everyone else has to justify their own positions in terms of your view.
If you want to say, "taxation is theft", just say it, instead of dragging things out from, "Well why should children have equal opportunities to other children anyways?"
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No, you don't welcome a rigorous discussion. You want to repeat discussions we've already had, in which you were not persuaded to others' points of view, and you didn't persuade them either. The likelihood that we'll all see the divine light of von Mises and convert this time is extraordinarily low. Stop trying.
> The likelihood that we'll all see the divine light of von Mises and convert this time is extraordinarily low. I disagree with Jabanga but the "market incentive to pay for smart kids to learn" is interesting - I'd say it's also very risky - a poor child's parents don't want to pay for the child's education, they're not smart, they decide to rob people, this isn't good for anyone. But I welcome the discussion and Jab…
No, I don't think he has been. His core premise is, "taxation is theft", that is, providing government services with tax money is morally wrong. From there, he has dragged us all into trying to refute his entirely rationalized ideological structure, which claims descriptively that taxing people and using it to provide services has inferior results to simply privatizing everything.
He's rationalizing descriptive data that don't fit the real world to maintain a strictly normative premise that he believes for strictly normative reasons. He then wants us to spend effort engaging with his descriptive claims as if they were the core matter, or even as if they were real descriptive claims and not rationalizations.
No, if they were actual descriptive claims, and he was actually engaging in consequential rather than deontic moral reasoning, he would notice that his descriptive claims contradict reality and change his mind on the core moral proposition. Instead, he's solid as a rock on his original claim, which means he's reasoning deontically, not to mention fallaciously: Thou Shalt Not Tax, therefore tax-funded schools are inferior.
That's downright rude.
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Jesus fucking christ dude, it's not about giving parents the opportunity to see their children be successful. It's about giving children the chance to be successful.
Don't bother responding. As soon as you catch a whiff of "taxation is theft" in a thread on the Internet you can be pretty sure you're communicating with someone who's solved government, coordination problems generally, and ethics from first principles (or, rather, read those who have, or been convinced in discussion with those who have read those who have). The only way to open them up to the possibility that some o…
Government is bad, taxes are theft, regulation is evil.
Repeat ad nauseam until your opponent gives up. Best way to treat them is like the trolls they are - ignore them.
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..and any child with "bad" parents has to work ten times as hard because they've spent their entire life swimming against the current. There's a reason why certain communities have radically different outcomes. The more motivated kind set their offspring up so that the default outcome is, on average, success. They have to try hard to not succeed.
> They have to try hard to not succeed. That is utter crap. They do have to make some bad decisions, but it's not like success is guaranteed for everyone who grows up in a white middle class neighborhood.
You know, if people can grow up in a privileged, middle-class neighborhood, unharmed by want or oppression, work reasonably hard, put in a normal level of effort, make reasonable-in-expectation decisions... and then wind up poor? Something is very wrong.
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I disagree because I think children should not be punished for the quality of their parent(s). I also think you are making a big (and incorrect) assumption that children who do not receive "investment" have parents that are neglecting them, rather than have parents who lack the means to make a substantial "investment".
I mean some people are born smarter than others. Maybe low IQ people deserve a monthly stipend, that high-IQ people are forced to pay, to compensate them for how unfair the universe was to them. I'm sorry for the facetiousness, but I just don't see any reasonable case for the government playing this kind of role in society. It all seems very moralizing and controlling.
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Because the children have no control over who their parents are, and we shouldn't punish with a lifetime of diminished opportunities because their parents aren't as "good" as others.
But we're not punishing them. We're simply not taking, by force, money from one person, to spend it raising the children of another. If we force people to subsidize other people's poor children, we create perverse incentives to have a maximum number of children with minimum personal investment in each. It cannot end well for society.
If justice is the greatest happiness for the greatest number, some degree of equitable income redistribution is a moral imperative. The exact degree needs to be experimentally determined, as income redistribution does reduce individual autonomy (which has the side effect of reducing happiness) and incentive to work (which results in less wealth to redistribute). The exact amount is also probably population specific, with cohesive, homogeneous populations tolerating more redistribution.