Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Briefly, I wish there were welfare for a wide variety of things. It just feels good to not have to pay for things. However, economically on aggregate I understand it's inefficiencies and the effects it has on incentives and all the things downstream of that.
I would also not lose much sleep if certain social things were illegal, but that's a slippery slope to a nanny state.
I persistently run into, in myself and others, a fantasy of welfare that would be perfectly set up to keep people from suffering a problem while also giving zero incentive to utilize it, and that it would be efficient. A world where no family is hungry because basic food ingredients are subsidized, they can get big sacks of rice and beans and potatoes and flour and milk for free that will keep them alive. Then someone shows me the actual math and how vastly inefficient such a system would be such that it would be more expensive than the food stamp program while delivering a worse product, purely for the purpose of punishing people who collect welfare and soothing the hurt feelings of people who don't. But still, I kind of wish it were real.
You can get a 10lb bag of rice for $10, that might as well be free. And rice and beans and lentils honestly aren't that bad, I'd much rather eat just that than whatever the average american eats, both by taste and by health.
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