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David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

theguardian.com

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Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#171

Post by robomartin »

jerf wrote: post #114
abalone wrote: post #61

Very good speech and an important national dialog to spark. I'd like to call attention to one thing though: "I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth." This demonstrates a basic confusion that we Americans have about ourselves, even most "lefties" and "libertarians": The false belief that we live in a free market economy. The truth is, the state plays a m…

The 2012 US GDP was 15.68 trillion. The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6% of the economic activity in the country. Depending on how you measure, you can quibble with this exact choice of numbers, but no matter how you fiddle you're not getting out of the Federal government being a huge part of the economy directly. State and local gov…

I agree with your views regarding less government being a good thing. Just in case some take pride in the number you provided I want to take a moment to put it into some context.

> The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6%

We thankfully have a canonical example that exposes just how bad government can be: Obamacare.

Government is the only organization on the planet that can take a website that could not possibly cost more than one to five million (as a ridiculous maximum) and turn it into a disaster costing upwards of a billion dollars. Think about THAT for a moment. It took government A BILLION DOLLARS just to make a website that the private sector could have delivered for A THOUSAND TIMES less money and in a third of the time. And, of course, it would have worked as required on day one.

I am not going to propose government money utilization is a thousand times less efficient than in the private sector across all domains. If I had to guess, based on my direct experience selling to various government agencies and seeing just how convoluted the process can become, I'd say the private sector is 50 to 100 times more efficient at everything. The exception, of course, is killing people and spying on the population.

I'll go with 100 times for easy numbers. This means whatever government accomplished with 3.54 trillion could have been done privately for a mere 35 billion. Even if I am off by a factor of ten this is still a major difference.

This means that this 22.6% participation is mostly money being burned. The actual real impact of government is probably somewhere in the the 2% or less range.

To use the lovely Obamacare canonical government-incompetence-and-waste example. Ask yourself this question: What could we have done with a billion dollars if instead of letting government burn it to try to build a website we had given five million of that to a qualified private entity to build the site and devoted $995 billion to, say, medical research or other massively valuable causes? Right. They just burned money that could have funded the discovery of a cure for Cancer and who knows what else.

You have to consider this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY...

and then this:

http://nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-1...

Hard to argue that the money is being spent with both discretion and intelligence. I point you to the 57% in military spending our many wars, pointless foreign aid, Solyndra and the inability to even manage the development of a website as proof.

No. Less government is better for all of us.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#172

Post by steveklabnik »

mmmbeer wrote: post #134
rquantz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing you don't understand: Yes, conservatives do want the poor to suffer, because they think the poor are poor because they're too lazy to work hard and overcome their poverty. Making them suffer is the only way to make them contribute to society, in their view. Also, yes, as a liberal, I do want to take money from the rich and give it to people who don't deserve it. That is exactly what I want to do. Wha…

> I do want to take money from the rich and give it to people who don't deserve it And what give you the right to take what belongs to others?

That's exactly the question I have for the rich. ;)

But no, seriously, that's the argument for wealth redistribution: the rich only are able to amass such wealth because of advantages they've accumulated for various reasons. If you're full-blown communist, it's due to the appropriation of the surplus labor produced by the proletariat. Therefore, you're just taking back what they took in the first place.

Now, you may disagree, but I figured since you asked, you might want an answer.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#173

Post by hbags »

dnautics wrote: post #155
jjoonathan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an often repeated libertarian mantra that the 22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Unfortunately, the network effect ensures that a "government node" in the economic graph is always nearby, and the coplexity inherent in the system makes it easy to form a plausible argument assigning blame to any node within distance 2 or 3 of a problem, making the mantra non-falsi…

22.6% of the US economy under state control is responsible for ~100% of the inequity. Inflation has a compounding effect of screwing the poor and transferring that wealth to the rich. It shouldn't be surprising that in 1970 Nixon unpegged the dollar and let inflation float and since 1973 the income inequality in this country has gradually become unhinged. we keep giving more power to fewer people under the rubric of…

Inflation is most damaging to those who save but do not invest. The poor are near 100% consumption, so it has essentially no effect on them.

A person whose average cash balance is $100 is not vulnerable to inflation.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#174

Post by CamperBob2 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #110
VMG wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrived example time? What is the political system on the spaceship that allows three of the four to hold a vote and kill off the least popular guy on the spaceship?

It's contrived but it highlights a real problem: free markets are very poorly suited to the task of avoiding tragedies of the commons. Unless you think tragedies of the commons don't happen in real life, the contrived example is relevant.

The problem with the example is that it doesn't illustrate the tragedy of the commons. Self-interest alone will lead the astronauts to do the right thing, because they're rational actors who are fully aware of their situation, and who are not in competition with each other. There's no incentive for the "libertarian" astronaut to consume more oxygen than the others.

In your example, only stupid astronauts (or, I suppose, mentally impaired ones) would fail to conserve their oxygen. It's better to structure your economic views to encourage and expect rational behavior among fully-aware actors, even if this ideal is rarely approached in practice.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#176

Post by mortyseinfeld »

majika wrote: post #6

This is a remarkably sensible speech. The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenil…

I see a lot of libertarian and anti-government sentiments expressed on HN.

And I see a lot of leftists on HN that are surprised that this is the case. Why is that?

The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not?

Because all of 310+ million are not in this together. We, as individuals, all have our own dreams, ambitions, interests, and goals.

I see a lot of leftist sentiment expressed on HN - sentiment for the same old failed ideas that was the cause of the so much misery in the last century and to this day.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#177

Post by steveklabnik »

anoncowherd wrote: post #170
steveklabnik wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NAP is pretty useless, because it doesn't define what 'force' or 'initiation' means. People have very significant disagreements about these definitions. Furthermore, it only makes sense in an alternate reality where we're re-set to zero. The NAP doesn't really provide a means from getting from where we are today to a world 'without force,' as if that was even possible.

>> The NAP is pretty useless, because it doesn't define what 'force' or 'initiation' means. Do you also need a definition for, say "rape", "kill", "steal", "rob"? What does it mean to "force someone to do something"? Have you got an inkling, perhaps? >> The NAP doesn't really provide a means from getting from where we are today to a world 'without force,' as if that was even possible. Why would it need to? It's not a…

I specifically mean that libertarians don't view property rights as forceful, but the left does.

> But if everyone adhered to it, the world would be a lovely place.

If it's not a possibility that can happen in the actual world, then the statement is basically meaningless.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#178

Post by bilbo0s »

sologoub wrote: post #128
hacknat wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some laws might be unjust, but the vast majority are just. It doesn't really seem like you're examining this assumption too closely. The vast majority are just? Really, the vast majority or laws are immaterial to criminal behavior. The vast majority of law is definition, e.g. Telecom companies are only allowed to use such-and-such a frequency band, utility companies must implement such-and-such safety measures, banks…

I'm not intending to insult your intelligence. I simply disagree with your sentiment. Having the benefit of knowing exactly what life is like in less fortunate society than US, it's a matter of perspective. Compare the state of law and law enforcement in US, say to Russia, and you will see that by this standard things aren't that bad here. No doubt they can be better, but at least I have some recourse under the law h…

But your attitude is just the point.

There are many issues with your stories, and many points at which they may go different ways. To give a single example, if I understand correctly, people disrespected you at a movie theater for asking them to quiet down. If I may...

did you ask them to quiet down in a respectful fashion?

Don't answer.

Just think about your own behavior towards them and TRY to evaluate it in an honest fashion. You may conclude that you would be better off moving out of that neighborhood. Or maybe being more polite. Or perhaps just going to a different movie theater. But whatever it is... it will probably make society a better place if you make the adjustments.

I don't mean to put too fine a point on it.. but we shouldn't take on the $40K a year expense of locking people up because you have a hard time with them at the movie theater. That money is better used elsewhere.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#179

Post by modfodder »

nickff wrote: post #57
scarmig wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument is tiresome. Many libertarians want to enforce a very particular and ahistorical version of property rights, one dictated from above and with a studied blindness for the reason we've invented the group of rights we think of as property. They want to subject everyone to a society where state violence is used for and only on behalf of people who in the past were granted monopoly access to some material go…

One might say that socialists want to enforce an oft repeated history of slavery and theft.

One might say the conservatives are doing the same (in the name of capitalism).

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#180

Post by steveklabnik »

patrickaljord wrote: post #165
steveklabnik wrote: post #38

It's really a shame that more people don't actually read 'Capital,' or at least the first three chapters of Capital I. While I ultimately disagree with Marx, I think he does a much, much better job of analyzing the problems we have than most people. Hence Simon's distinction between 'diagnostician' and 'clinician.' It was Lenin and Mao that really tried to be the clinicians, anyway. It's a Sunday, if you've got some…

People like to say that Lenin and Mao were bad clinicians, if only there was a messiah smart enough to implement communism. In spite of the fact that plenty of other governments gave it a try too. Truth is, Lenin and even Stalin were pretty smart guys and they implemented communism the way it was meant to be . Actually, a guy predicted the Lenin/Stalin way would be the end-result for any communism implementation. The…

It does sound familiar, I'm (often) an anarchist. You do realize individualist anarchists (like Tucker) are still socialists, yes? And Tucker still subscribes to the labor theory of value?

> so much has been proven wrong.

Sigh.

> The argument that the value of a commodity is only related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity and not to other factors is now well known to be wrong.

You're absolutely right, and that's not what Marx says. You're criticizing Smith or Ricardo here, just like Marx is.

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