Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well • Hacker News Board

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#101

Post by Symmetry » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 4:08 PM UTC

goggles99 wrote: post #38

Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this. The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul (such as people who have made mistakes, people who have no reason to care, impoverished people, prisoners ETC.)... What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to…

mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this.

That sounds far more difficult, subject to corruption, and less efficient than having the government care for other people directly. Sure, having everybody be good to each other could be much more efficient than government aid, but having the government mandate and define "good to each other" is so very difficult.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#102

Post by frobozz » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 4:16 PM UTC

Kliment wrote: post #43

goggles99 wrote: post #38

Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this. The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul (such as people who have made mistakes, people who have no reason to care, impoverished people, prisoners ETC.)... What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to…

Sounds like a recipe for even worse corruption. Pay into your friend's charity, have your friend pay into your charity. Make a deal with a homeless person that if you get back half of what you give them you'll give them a lot of money. You can continue on your own.

Not to mention taking advantage of the deduction by "volunteering" at your friend's charity in some kind of fuzzily-defined "advisory" role, probably by attending a series of "thought camps" with your friend at his villa in The Bahamas or chalet in Klosters.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#103

Post by sjg007 » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 4:17 PM UTC

giardini wrote: post #98

wahsd wrote: post #86

Those who have for centuries fooled the rest of humanity into believing that their unearned, illegitimate, and unwarranted elevated status is justified know the findings of this painfully obvious fact to be true. Which is why they pull out all and every stop to prevent the majority from realizing it by vilifying anyone and anything that could spread that realization.

"Those who have for centuries fooled the rest of humanity ..." I don't understand the above. Are you speaking of economists, politicians, academia in general, or all of these perhaps? Please clarify.

The rich.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#104

Post by mrbgty » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 4:32 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #58

goggles99 wrote: post #38

Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this. The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul (such as people who have made mistakes, people who have no reason to care, impoverished people, prisoners ETC.)... What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to…

But "the government" is people. Society said, "let people take care of people", and government is the answer to how to do that. The government is "full of corruption and waste" because people are. We constantly try to find ways to organize society (and government as a crucial part of society) in ways that minimize corruption and waste, or mitigate their effects. > That is something that no government could ever accom…

"But "the government" is people. Society said, "let people take care of people", and government is the answer to how to do that. The government is "full of corruption and waste" because people are."

The government is one answer for how to do that.

Society and government are not the same.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#105

Post by ctdonath » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

goggles99 wrote: post #38

Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this. The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul (such as people who have made mistakes, people who have no reason to care, impoverished people, prisoners ETC.)... What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to…

Charities existed, in robust force, for a long time before the government stepped in and confiscated so much money from people they didn't have much left to care for others as they saw fit. We had charities all over the place competing for this money, and did produce far better results than the abysmal record of the state/federal social services, until the government stepped in and made it terribly difficult to provide such charity - on the grounds of closing the inevitable gaps which government still fails to close (and never will). The competition to provide charity is being destroyed by a government regulating competitors out of existence.

I leverage an opportunity to provide food to the poor. It's amazing how many places can't take bushels of bread for distribution thereto because of governmental regulations. In requiring better donations (vanishingly small improvements at prohibitive cost), nothing gets donated and the food all too often gets trashed.

Just change tax code to allow 1-1 deduction of charitable donations from tax liability (instead of taxable income), without limit, along with relaxing burdensome regulations on charities (realizing that something done poorly is better than nothing, and requiring something better leads to nothing).

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#106

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

goggles99 wrote: post #38

Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this. The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul (such as people who have made mistakes, people who have no reason to care, impoverished people, prisoners ETC.)... What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to…

> Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this.

> [...]

> That is something that no government could ever accomplish.

I think there is an inconsistency in your argument. You've just suggested a mode of action by government, not something government cannot do.

As to the particular mechanism, however, it is unlikely to work. The basic idea...

> We would have charities all over the place competing for this money, competition would produce far better results than the abysmal record of the state/federal social services.

...is fundamentally flawed. The theoretical efficiency of competitive markets is intimately tied to the assumption that both the benefits and costs are known to and born by the participants in the decision making processes, aligning rational self-interest with efficient decision making. In the charities competing for money from givers to provide services to those in need, the features which make markets theoretically efficient do not apply.

> All we ever see from the media is bad news. We never see lives being turned around from welfare or other social services.

That's because bad news is good for selling media (the perception that the world is a dangerous place and you need to keep consuming the media source from which you got that impression to know where the next imminent danger is very useful to holding an audience, independently of any connection it has to real circumstances), not because lives aren't turned around by welfare and other social services.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#107

Post by ctdonath » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 4:59 PM UTC

fab13n wrote: post #74

pron wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "the government" is people. Society said, "let people take care of people", and government is the answer to how to do that. The government is "full of corruption and waste" because people are. We constantly try to find ways to organize society (and government as a crucial part of society) in ways that minimize corruption and waste, or mitigate their effects. > That is something that no government could ever accom…

> But "the government" is people. The way matter is subatomic particles. The same thing at very different scales exhibit very different properties, and although technically true, it's misleading to consider governments as sets of people. They lack some essential features exhibited by individuals and small groups, features which we aptly call _humanity_. The parent's proposal is to delegate stuff which require humanit…

Poorly executed centralization easily turns into communism, which fails spectacularly on anything but tribal scales.

Decentralization sure has its problems, but tends to beat the alternatives. Of course, where you end up in each system and how you benefit/suffer there may influence whether you agree.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#108

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 5:05 PM UTC

wikiburner wrote: post #49

goggles99 wrote: post #38

Here is a wild concept, mandate that people take care of people. Use the government only to enforce this. The government is full of corruption and waste, they are innefective in matters that require an actual soul (such as people who have made mistakes, people who have no reason to care, impoverished people, prisoners ETC.)... What if you could take the percentage of taxes that you spend every year and choose whom to…

I've had similar thoughts on social security. It would make a lot of sense to simply require citizens to save or invest a certain portion of their annual income. You could have enforced diversification (certain percentages allowed for high vs. low risk), and accreditation boards to vet and approve mutual and index funds. Also, the investment would have a very stimulative effect on the economy, and you could probably…

> It would make a lot of sense to simply require citizens to save or invest a certain portion of their annual income.

Not to serve the purpose of social security, which is to serve as a minimal fallback defined benefit pension to to mitigate the effects of old-age poverty in the event that personal retirement savings fail due to investment risk (either by failure of personal investment, failure of private pensions, etc.)

It would be a nice public subsidy to the financial services industry, which is why that industry and their political proxies keep recommending this, but it wouldn't actually serve the purpose social security is designed to serve.

> It would be quite a bit less draconian than the government simply confiscating the money.

Not really; either way the government is seizing the money and directing its use.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#109

Post by head_stomp » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 5:09 PM UTC

ddebernardy wrote: post #18

ekianjo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Excessive wealth is usually hoarded (in bank accounts), not used: But if you want the economy to work the most (creating jobs, etc.), you need to make money circulate as much as possible (which is not what rich people usually do). Another economical fallacy. When you put money in the bank, it's not standing there doing nothing. Savings are invested, loaned, used to create additional value. That's why banks want y…

> Another economical fallacy. When you put money in the bank, it's not standing there doing nothing. Savings are invested, loaned, used to create additional value. That's why banks want your money. (...) Actually, it's the other way around. Banks loan money first. Only then do they worry about the amount of cash they have in their vault. The parent post is actually correct for the most part: excessive amounts of weal…

This is such an asinine argument against loanable funds theory and is equivalent to saying, "Actually, it's the other way around. People drive their cars first. Only then do they worry about the amount of gas they have in their tank." You see the same kind of nonsense from MMTers who use their confused understandings of accounting identities to justify their policies. In addition, the notion that entities that have excessive amounts of wealth, ie they have accumulated capital through successful investments, would be less likely to put their money to good use is silly. It's not capital accumulation that leads to bubbles. Historically, it's been caused by an influx of money not supported by production due to currency debasement, precious metals stolen from the new world flooding into the Holland, various precious metal rushes, excessive printing of paper currency or bank money, or suppression of interest rates.

Re: Cash to the poor: Giving money directly works surprisingly well

#110

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

mynewwork wrote: post #93

vidarh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not just dismissive of Egalitarinism only because it's unnatural, but also because it goes against the individual's freedom in the end. Only if you define an individuals freedom as "freedom to deprive others of access to shared natural resources through violence" (I use the term violence since libertarians seems overly fond of referring to government interference as "violence"; except when it comes to enforcing…

I see a lot of attacks on any sort of libertarian (and for balance, many attacks at libertarian straw-men) on HN that use this same sort of inversion of force - the "stopping theft is violence" argument. Yours seems well-written enough that maybe you can answer one question I have about your viewpoint. In your post, you refer to "shared natural resources" and then "deprive others of access to certain resources". Do y…

> Do you just mean "shared natural resources" as things like rivers, oceans, air, fossil fuels or does the argument really mean everything in existence because it presumably leveraged those things?

Generally, the theory behidn the argument you refer to is that everything in existence consists of two things: 1) Shared natural resources, and 2) The application of individual labor to shared natural resources.

So, everything that is constructed as "property" has at least has a component of shared natural resources being withheld from the commons, for which some duty is owed back to the commons. Even if the shared resource has little use value in its natural state, the act of denying others the right to apply their labor to it has a cost to the commons.

> For instance, suppose I pick up a rock which everyone agrees has almost no value. I chip at it with another rock for a week until it now is in a shape of some useful tool, furniture or art. In your ideal system, who owns the value created through my labor? Do all people have equal claim to the item because it started out as a rock which was a shared resource? Do I own it? Something else?

In any system which recognizes the existence of an extraction of resources from the commons as described previously, "ownership" trends to be qualified. Most likely, you would be (presuming that your extraction of the rock was within the rules governing the use of resources from the commons) the "owner" of the tool, but you would also owe a duty in exchange for both the permanent effects on the commons of altering the rock and the temporary effects of withholding the item from the commons. There are many ways this duty might manifest, but the most common would be various taxes on value or produced income.