ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
No bio...
User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
This will be very difficult, for two major reasons:
- 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.
- 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.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
If it were not true that most of the people who voted Democrat before Reagan vote Republican now, then where did all those Democratic voters go and where did all the Republican voters come from?
Exactly. People change their party affiliations over time. Parties change their platforms over time. Ascribing a consistent principled philosophy to a political party, a group that is a Ship of Theseus in both membership and in ideas, is a fool's errand. It would be more accurate to treat the parties as brand new groups every election. Republicans_1984 is not Republicans_2024. And criticizing a party based on the platforms of past parties that share the same name is invalid. It was different people and a different platform.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
There's a difference between consequences from the state and consequences from private actors. The jail term is just the least-common-denominator solution society has agreed on for punishing his crime. Any private person can also form their own independent opinion of what consequences he should face, and share their opinion.
From the perspective of private actors, it is deeply unfair to expect them to treat someone who has served a sentence for a crime the same as someone who never committed the crime. Clearly the fact that someone committed a crime predicts their future behavior in a Bayesian sense. People should be allowed to use that information to inform how they treat the perpetrator. Imagine the state, for reasons, fines criminals just $1 for committing, say, date rape. This is the right balance of deterrence, justice, incapacitation, and bureaucracy that meets the state's needs. If you're a woman considering having a drink with a man who's paid out $200 in such fines over the past year, you should be allowed to know and to act on the man's criminal history! Your own judgment of the severity of his crime can be wildly different from the state's.
However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.
I assume that any competitive male athlete has a higher level of sexual aggression than average, so this article doesn't shift my judgment of him by much. But it's reasonable for other people to get value out of learning this part of his history. It's also reasonable to want to strike fear in the hearts of future statutory rapists to prevent them from acting. So I can't condemn this article; people have a right to know.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
11mo ago
The costs are not symmetric, and the woman bears costs no matter which option is taken.
| Right to financial abortion | Right to physical abortion | |
|---|---|---|
| Woman | Impossible; still has to bring the child to term and give birth, a huge cost. | ✓ |
| Man | ✓ | Reprehensible; would be forcing the woman to have an abortion. She still bears medical risk. |
It is, at least in my state. Keep in mind that people sometimes register in one party to influence the primary, then vote for the other party in the general election. So you can't tell someone's true allegiance just by seeing which party they're registered under.
More options
Context Copy link