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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Did I really need to include an exhaustive list of, 'things that make people happy but are bad for them so I would not want to subsidize those things'?

Alternatively, do you think it is literally impossible to have a 'positive-sum' redistributive program that does not boil down to buying people Heroin?

it is literally impossible to have a 'positive-sum' redistributive program that does not boil down to buying people Heroin?

I'll bite the bullet and say I think that it is literally impossible to have a redistributive program that the poor-for-a-reason don't then use to finance terrible decisions, yes. They can be extremely inventive about turning foodstamps into income which they then spend on drugs, for example.

I am not a huge fan of education, and would argue that we as a species don't have a great idea of how to even do 'education' as it is often presented. I suspect that there is an education floor that is necessary and useful though and that our modern education system is more than sufficient to meet that floor, expenditures in excess of it are probably low value. However I believe that for the vast majority of it's existence the American public school system has been an effective redistributive program that produced more value than it cost us as a nation. I think it is increasingly difficult to do good welfare programs because a bunch of sociologists decided to make a bunch of shit up 40 years again and nobody has ever called them on it, but we could do better than we currently are pretty easily. I do not have a strong opinion if any given current program is positive sum, but I think some probably already are, and we could do better than we currently do.

I think you can have a positive-sum redistribution(of course, part of that is accepting that a lot of it is going to the lower middle class rather than the truly poor), just not one that doesn't get spent on drugs by the people who really need to make a wiser purchase with the money, unless you just follow @2rafa's suggestion and pass out free heroin adulterated with poisoned fentanyl.

I do not think a positive-sum redistributive program is likely. While there are instances of redistribution which might be positive sum, I do not believe a program which can reliably find these among the rather larger universe of negative-sum redistribution is possible. As for not buying people heroin, if the people running the program were harsh, flinty-eyed believers in the necessity of their program to do good, they could likely keep that at a minimum. But since the program will actually be run mostly by either disinterested bureaucrats who care only that the metrics they are measured by go up, or worse by bleeding hearts who think providing free heroin is a good thing, there will be plenty of heroin bought.

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