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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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This will be very difficult, for two major reasons:

  1. Government operates based on rules, while private entities operate based on performance. Your boss can fire you if you're ineffective. The government can only fire you if you don't follow the rules. It's easy to follow the rules and still be ineffective. So government relies on constructing the right rules to achieve its ends, and we don't even agree on the ends, much less the specific rules. The rules end up being byzantine tomes of regulations that no one understands. So there's tons of intractable inefficiency that cannot be addressed. Musk would have to somehow make government employment contingent on performance rather than rules.
  2. More importantly, efficiency requires making costs and benefits explicit and commensurable so tradeoffs can be made. People hate making money commensurable with lives, happiness, or other sacred values. Even conservatives use terms like "death panels" when this topic comes up. Any cost-cutting that comes at the expense of a few hours at the end of a few peoples' lives, or of the academic success of a few economically disadvantaged children, is going to be raised as a fatal flaw in the whole endeavor, regardless of how many billions of dollars were saved. Musk would need to sidestep this issue somehow.

My best idea for solving #2 is to give people a choice to accept a payment to forgo a government benefit. For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan. This of course is distasteful to supporters of government healthcare, because they want the costs to be socialized. Adverse selection will cause people who are healthy to opt out etc. The same adverse selection follows for other kinds of government benefits, such as education with school vouchers. In the limit, the people remaining receiving benefits would be precisely those who take out more than they put in, and this would highlight the cost everyone is paying to support those people. The existing system obfuscates who is causing the high costs.

Doesn’t Germany allow individuals to opt out of public pensions(but not back in)?

For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan.

The problem with that is that people will take the money, spend it, and then we'll see a parade of sad little kids on CNN whose parents can't afford medical treatment, and then the government will have to either pay for the medical treatment anyway (encouraging people to take advantage and raising the costs), or they'll have to go on CNN and publicly declare "fuck the kids", which they won't.

You could, trivially, cover basic healthcare for all the children in the country and waive everything else. I think Harris county's gold card system works a bit like this- hospitals will always be reimbursed for the health care they aren't allowed to deny+basic preventative, and it saves money in the big picture view.

I think this is the root of the problem in a nutshell.

In a modern society, very few people - even reactionary conservatives - are truly comfortably with the idea of stupid people dying in the streets. To be clear, I'm not talking about drug addicts, career criminals, etc. I mean otherwise law abiding citizens who just suck with money. We all probably have at least one friend or relative who is an all around good person, but just awful at managing money. I don't think that person should end up so destitute that "dying from exposure" is a real risk. This same logic is why most societies decided to eliminate the debtors prisons.

But if there's some sort of guarantee - explicity in the case of social security, but implicit in a future even without defined benefits - that you won't starve simply because you're a moron, people will continue to be morons.

I think our debt and deficit realities are too large to get out of with austerity. "The only way out is through" meaning we need a new generation level of growth to happen. This won't be AI automating laptop jobs. It really has to be something like (forgive the buzzword) a second industrial revolution. There's also a necessary energy component and the really enraging fact there is that we know what that is - nuclear. There is a literal Green Cult out there, however, that is dedicated to preventing the human species from solving nearly all of its energy challenges.

Human nature can't be mitigated with crafty policy. That is one of the central tenets of classic conservatism and one of the horrible, awful traps that Liberals keep falling into.

We all probably have at least one friend or relative who is an all around good person, but just awful at managing money. I don't think that person should end up so destitute that "dying from exposure" is a real risk.

They aren't. And outside of soviet republics, true shitholes or countries undergoing historic catastrophes, nobody fitting that description ever was. Dying from exposure in the middle of the street takes multiple levels of failure, requires burning every safety net there is one by one. Just failing at money is not enough - friends and family are still there. Unless someone lost and/or alienated all of them, which is even more massive a failure than going bankrupt.

But that's just a nitpick; I'm not disputing your larger point.

We all probably have at least one friend or relative who is an all around good person, but just awful at managing money. I don't think that person should end up so destitute that "dying from exposure" is a real risk.

You can let them die of exposure, you can control their life for them, or you can shovel in-principal-unlimited amounts of money at them. No other choices.

Limiting this today is that there is one large group for whom dying from exposure or controlling is considered OK, which is adult men.

I agree. Deaths of Despair for white males and intragroup murder for black and latino is the slow motion mechanism for societal realignment. We can pretend otherwise for a few generations but, eventually, gravity catches up.

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