Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive

In my own social circle, I know the following:

1. Poor people who work for a living. 2. Poor people who can't work because they have a felony record. 3. Poor people who can't work because of health reasons. 4. Poor people who don't work because they're lazy.

I also know:

1. Rich people who work for a living. 2. Rich people whose family members don't work because they're "lazy".

You see, there's all sorts of people. Let's take the "worst" examples--the people who both poor and out of work. Personally I think even "lazy" people deserve to receive the basic care of civilized society. Why? Because "lazy" is often code for referring to people with mental deficiencies, emotional problems, histories of severe abuse, and other issues that lead to severe depression and failure to thrive.

A lot of modern American polical rhetoric centers around an idea that might be called the "virtuous poor". Which is that poor people only deserve to be helped if they are virtuous--good, salt-of-the-earth people who are struggling constantly to survive--who are savvily trimming coupons and saving every cent so they can better themselves and their children. On the other side are the non-virtuous poor. The people who spend their government check on alcohol, crack cocaine, or satellite TV.

In America, we obsess over separating the virtuous from non-virtuous poor, ignoring the self-sustaining and cyclic nature of poverty. The clear correlations between poverty and behavior problems, learning problems, health problems, etc. In our self righteous drive to only help those who help themselves, we often ignore the clear consequences.

For every self-satisfied working upper-middle class person I know, I also know someone who has similar intelligence, similar drive (or lack thereof), but wasn't lucky enough to be ushered into college by their well-to-do parents--who wasn't lucky enough to be offered this and that entry-level position by their well-to-do connections. And yes, such a person doesn't become the virtuous poor we all like to help, such a person becomes the dirty, yucky poor that we want to forget about--the poor people who aren't constantly fighting to better themselves.

You can throw out statistics--all of your statistics will show a predominance of this and a dearth of that, and in the end, your rounding errors will still cover millions of people. And your response to the plight of those millions of people is that we can help them with "a small, targeted program." If only we'd thought of that sooner--here we were trying big, untargeted programs, when all we needed to do is shrink and target them.

In general terms government consists of 3 choices. What do we prohibit(1), promote(2), and how much do we forfeit(3). The libertarian view is to focus on minimize 1 and 2 with the assumption that it minimizes 3. But, as soon as you pick a sacred cow like defense and say this is governments job there is no clear limits, should we build 10,000 nukes? how about 100,000?

In my view if you instead pick how many resources government has to work with and focus on maximizing benefit you naturally start to balance collage scholarships and attack subs. You also tend to avoid budget deficits because if you assume you only have a given budget to work with you don't do the I need do do all these things and taxes must be below _ so I guess we need to barrow a little bit more. Basically, stepping from what can the government do, to how well can the government afford to do X,Y and Z. Which fit's with the reality of diminishing returns while your 10th nuke is worth more than an extra math scholarship your 100,010th is not. As well as differing option on just how important various things are.

PS: As to why 1/3, well at best I might get to keep 50% more money, but government is going to take something so it's just a classic compromise. Also, while it's probably not the top of the laughter curve it's closer to the top than 20% so lowering it is not going to provide more income for the government.

If our attention spans are that fried, are we any better off than the hypothetical guy trying to fill out a government form?

It's a bit like taking someone's synopsis for what the Bible is about. You can't. You have to read it, experience it and parse it yourself or you can't really know.

Myself, I'm not going to pablum-feed you guys a over-simplified short form version of what I think I just read. Read it for yourself.

No wonder libraries are endangered.

There are transaction costs for Government action too. In general they are higher. Government has no special ability to keep transaction costs low.

> Surely as argued above, contagious disease prevention would qualify as a public good

It has excludable ("public") and non-excludable aspects like all goods. It's certainly possible, in theory, to make a profit off it. But today no such thing is organized, meanwhile the Government does have it under control, and the total cost isn't very high relative to the country's wealth. So there's much, much higher priorities to privatize like the postal system or social security.

I think reform needs to go one step at a time. Do I predict that contagious disease control will and should one day be done differently? Yes I guess so, though the far future is quite hazy. Let's not worry too much about that because by the time we get closer to doing something it will be a lot clearer what works or not.

But when you bring up something like education, where we already have many private educational institutions, and public schools are widely regarded as largely failing, no I don't think the Government is good at this and no I don't want to spend billions in taxes on throwing money at stuff with institutional problems other than underfunding (e.g. teacher's unions and the wrong epistemology).

A good transitional proposal is vouchers. In this way the Government can subsidize poor people or any other favored group while not actually running any schools. So if what you want is access to education, paid for by the Government, you can still have that without Government actually running schools. I think that'd be a good step forward.

Transitions are important because if you cut off aid to some group overnight then they are going to get fucked in the meantime before alternatives are created. And transitions are also important in that alternatives are not created before some sort of transitional steps are implemented to allow alternatives a purpose and ability to be useful.