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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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The world is irreducibly complex. The complexity of managing the health and economic assets of a modern human is enormous. You cannot make it go away, you can only allocate it.,

There exactly two ways to manage it. Either you manage your own complexity, or some other person is allowed to manage your complexity for you.

In the first case, those below the cognitive or agentic thresholds necessary to manage the complexity will fail. Every year the world becomes more complex, and more and more of the population will find themselves, fat, sick, and in debt.

In the second case, no matter how you set them up, the systems for managing other people will eventually be populated by busybodies who enjoy managing other people's lives. Health care will be rationed by race according to the whims of a she/her in a mask.

Not all complexity is irreducible. In fact, most of it isn't.

Take, for example, the government program of HSA's (Health Savings Accounts). These are meant to help people save for medical expenses. But, since they have an annoying amount of complexity and paperwork, they are essentially impossible for stupid people to use. Smart people, on the other hand, use them for a completely different purpose entirely: to accumulate tax free wealth.

None of this had to exist. What if, instead of coming up with HSAs, the government simply... didn't.

Stupid people get benefits from just about every governmental system that has been erected. And you are harping on one of the few that doesn't help them because they can't "this one trick" it? HSAs solve a problem caused by the government, that being health insurance mandates. Smart people use them to minimize the DWL caused by them.