Covid has got me thinking about the government’s role in social welfare. Providing social welfare through money allows for people to misallocate the money or skim off the top of the money. For the vast majority of people their covid stimulation money did not go into their pockets, it went to their landlord or their mortgage holder resulting in a massive wealth transfer from public funds to banks and those who own lan…
that creates its own perverse incentives. instead, we as citizens should do one thing keenly and singularly, and that is to make representatives regulate markets toward fairness and competitiveness, and against consolidation and regulatory capture. markets work best when there are dozens of mostly mid-sized competitors, not monopolized. capitalism is predicated on such competitive and fair markets, otherwise the capital allocation function doesn’t work (as we’ve seen for the past 50+ years). do not be distracted even a single bit on culture war topics (including covid).