gog
22d ago
Who counts as "productive"? In the Bill and Shelley thread people are using the word to mean anything from "blameless" to "civilizationally load-bearing." Having a definition for "productive" is important to enable people who disagree to converse, otherwise everyone's talking past each other. The best candidate I've seen is "reducing the per-unit cost of a good or service." On this definition Bill and Shelley are obviously not currently productive, since they just spend money and therefore bid up prices of things. The guy who invented the GMO rice is obviously extremely productive, since he made rice way cheaper for millions of people. But what if Bill and Shelley grow one carrot this year, and eat it instead of buying one at the store. They have, in some small way, reduced the per-unit cost of carrots, but this wouldn't be enough for us to call them productive. There's some ratio of how-much-you-reduced-prices to how-much-you-bid-them-up that most people seem to have in mind when they call someone productive in a strictly economic sense. We don't have to quibble over what that ratio is, but it seems to get hard when you consider someone working as a small cog in the Apple machine, or the Toyota machine. Their contribution to reducing per-unit prices is a lot closer to growing one carrot than it is to inventing GMO rice. What definition are you using? How do you tell who is productive?
gog
22d ago
I'll continue this with you if you explain your understanding of the difference between an economic and a moral argument. You keep stating that the situation isn't fair, which is a moral complaint, not an economic one. I don't dispute that it isn't fair, I dispute that if it were abolished everyone currently alive would get richer.
gog
22d ago
A fact is not an argument. "If you don't stay home old people may get COVID" is a medical fact, but it is not obvious from that fact what the best course of societal action is.
But anyway, I thought you meant Broken Window policing. The difference between this and the Broken Window fallacy is that these people aren't actually inflicting any damage. They're spending huge amounts of money on frivolous stuff (which is why OP is offended), and that money is circulating around so that high earners can earn it again. The speed of money through the economy drives economic growth, and while a perfectly laissez-faire system might very well have a higher speed of money, switching to such a system, even if it were phased in over a few years, would cause a huge economic contraction. You might object that, as with broken windows, the 27% tax bill is imposing an opportunity cost, that taking OP's money so someone on "stress leave" can buy Tinkerbell statues prevents him from inventing a better battery or something, but A) not giving the Tinkerbell salesman that money might prevent HIM from inventing the same battery and B)the vast majority of taxes taken collected from the industrious and squandered by the poor on frivolous stuff actually impose the opportunity cost of the industrious not being able to squander the money on frivolous stuff himself. So it all boils down to who "deserves" the money, and all talk of desert is moral disputation. Since no one agrees on morality anymore, there can be no moral disputation on a wide scale and so people need to either make peace with the current system or wield it to their benefit.
gog
22d ago
Government spending on these sorts of programs is so huge that anyone old enough to be posting here would not live long enough to see things shake out if things ever switched, assuming they survived the violence that such a transition would probably involve. If we were setting up a society from scratch, then the current system would be something to avoid, certainly. Having come as far down this road as we have, though, any benefits from switching would fall mainly on generations to come. That might be a great thing, but "duty to future generations" is a moral, not an economic argument. I'm not defending the morality of the system, just explaining that it's not the simple math problem OP seems to think it is.
Furthermore, all of the experiments (I assume you're talking about free-market vs socialist countries) have converged on wild government spending. Unless you say that REAL capitalism has never been tried, then maybe 90% of the population recirculating the wealth produced by the remaining 10% is just how it works? Maybe that's the true triumph of post-scarcity industrial victory: welfare grift and BS jobs for the lucky majority and productive, morally-pure, toil for the unfortunate few.
gog
22d ago
"The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious" is not an economic argument, it's a moral one. I don't see the resemblance to Broken Windows- can you clarify?
gog
22d ago
While it might be morally offensive that these spendthrift slackers aren’t working as hard as you are, economically it doesn’t matter very much. You can think of your own prosperity in terms of absolute (nominal) numbers, but the real value of your wealth matters a lot more, and the real value of your wealth depends on your relative position in the economy- what fraction of the total economy you own.
If all government aid to these people were switched off overnight and your 27% tax bill were reduced to zero, you would own 27% more of the economy than you do now, but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain. So you wouldn’t be much richer, you might be poorer, and your relative status would be much lower because the median income would skyrocket (because the parasite class would be dead).
-People are forgetting past perfective. You can find oodles of Youtube videos titled "What I wish I knew before I started (whatever undertaking)" and every one of them means "What I wish I had known."
-Fewer vs less. "I got less chances in that game" is not a thing. Makes you sound like a 5-year-old, right up there with "How much couches do you have."
And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again! SEIZE THE MEANS OF INFLECTION!!!!!!!!
One more: "Have a good rest of your day" is rampant in Canada and has almost completed replaced "Have a good day" among customer service workers under 30 years old. To wish anyone anything implies that you wish it for the future. Are they worried that I might think they're wishing that the past of my day, up to the point of our interaction, had gone (or more likely "went") well? What happened to these people?
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