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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Am I a parasite? I got into a car accident about five years ago that was my fault, and I received a payout from my insurance company that was grossly disproportionate to the premiums I paid during the time I used that carrier. I was effectively leeching off of every other policyholder who didn't file a claim during that time period. Thanks to the payout, I was able to buy a new car within a week of the accident. And yes, I could have afforded the new car otherwise; I wouldn't have been financially destitute, or even had to take out a loan. And there are probably people who were with that company for years who never made a single claim who were paying for my carelessness. But nobody would realistically call me a parasite; I purchased a product meant to cover exactly that situation, and I used the product for what it was for.

Now imagine a scenario where every insurance policy includes a clause where the policy doesn't cover any driving done within 24 hours of an inch or more of snowfall. Would you risk driving in that situation? Maybe you would in some circumstances, but you'd have to think long and hard about whether that trip was necessary, and I guarantee that Ubers would be hard to find and very expensive. How would this affect the economy? A lot of people say that money makes the world go round, but it would be more accurate to say that insurance makes the world go round. As a civil defense attorney, my salary is paid almost exclusively by insurance companies who are governed by extremely complicated webs of policies and splits and reinsurance and a bunch of other fun stuff dating back to the 1940s in some cases and involving policies that no one would have thought they'd still be paying claims on in 2025.

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance. You may say that you work hard, etc., etc. and will never need these policies, but that's about as ingenuous as saying that you're a really good driver and thus don't need liability insurance. You may say that the people who receive the greatest benefit from welfare policies pay the least into it, but how much you receive in insurance payouts is only loosely related to how much you pay in. A guy who crashes a brand new Mercedes a week after driving it off the lot and bought the policy at the same time as the car is getting much more than someone who insured luxury vehicles with the same company for decades, yet no one would say that he is lucky for this having happened because he really got his money's worth. And saying that it's compulsory isn't a great argument either, because a lot of insurance law is more compulsory than you think. Insurance markets are highly regulated; I have a small bookshelf in my office filled with publications discussing all the regulations involving insurance coverage in Pennsylvania, mostly as they apply to large companies whose own welfare you rely on without even realizing it. Believe me, the insurance companies would have left half the Fortune 500 out to dry if regulators hadn't told them they couldn't.

Which brings me to my larger point: Deciding that someone is a parasite is more complicated than you think, and is usually more determined by innate biases than anything objective. Consider that most conservatives consider themselves in favor of "law and order" and all the popular implications that expression has. I don't think it's too controversial to state that poorer areas of cities have more crime than wealthier ones. I also don't think it's controversial to assume that residents of lower crime areas tend to contribute a disproportionate amount to the police budget through taxes. Yet I've never once heard a conservative suggest that cities should direct more police resources toward patrolling wealthy communities and less towards poorer communities with higher crime rates. And I've never heard any conservative suggest that residents of poor neighborhoods are parasites because they get more policing for their dollar than people who live elsewhere.

OF course, this is because there is a broad societal consensus that crime is a bad thing at that society as a whole benefits from lower crime rates everywhere. We can say the same thing about most white collar crime, which wasn't even recognized as crime until relatively recently. In the early days of the Republic, if you went to the authorities because you suspected your accountant was stealing from you, the response would be along the lines of "That's a shame. You should consider finding another accountant." Of course, these days we expect that if we entrust people with out money that they won't just steal it from us, and that companies have certain responsibilities to consumers that they can't just straight up lie, and all kinds of little other things that we take for granted these days. If a poor person buys a bottle of cheap whiskey that in the past would have been adulterated beyond recognition but these days will result in no harm greater than a hangover, we don't say that he's freeloading off of taxes used to fund the FDA. And when Donald Trump files six bankruptcies for companies he owns, conservatives don't call him a parasite because in the 19th Century legislatures recognized that limiting the liability of investors was better for the economy than making the holder of a single share liable for the whole kit and kaboodle, and that a formalized system of bankruptcy was better than throwing people into debtor's prison or hounding them for the rest of their lives. The losers are obviously the creditors who are left holding the bag, but to a certain extent the possibility of default is priced into the transaction. In other words, we all pay a little bit for the fuckups of irresponsible business owners, even if we ourselves are paragons of success.

Insofar as social welfare programs are insurance, they're among the most efficient kind of insurance, since the risk pool includes everybody. Since it's compulsory, we already recognize that it's not going to be the kind of gold-plated payout one would expect from a private carrier. When I totaled my car, the insurance company was, by law, required to find listings for similar cars and pay market value. By contrast, even something as explicitly tied to how much you pay into it as unemployment insurance only nets a percentage of your total loss. Are there downsides? Of course. Some people will ruthlessly try to min-max their benefits, and others will engage in outright fraud, and there is an omnipresent moral hazard that reliance on welfare will lead to dependence. But these same arguments can be made about private insurance. Yet I hear no one arguing that there's something problematic about people who try to maximize their insurance payout through legal means of getting them to enforce the contract, I never hear suggestions that the existence of fraud means we should get rid of insurance altogether, and I never hear people arguing for self-insurance to reduce moral hazard (yes, people with insurance are more careless about certain things than those without, and those with insurance often only take certain precautions because the insurance companies require it).

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance.

Not until we allow actuaries to adjust the amount we have to pay based on our risk profile.

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance.

I truely thought this line was dead. Ive already seen socialists use the fact that everyone knows this isnt true to make fun of their opponents. "Take your government hands of my medicare, lmao trumpies really have no idea how the world works. They totally didnt just believe the lie our predecessors sold them, no, this is totally evidence that we are the ones you should listen to". But I guess theres always someone. How do you exist at a TheMotte-level of political awareness into the present day?

It is in fact very easy to tell that there is parasitism here. You just need to compare the "premiums" with the expected pay-out. This could in theory involve complicated statistics, but fortunately government programms dont even pretend to take riskfactors into account (in fact, politicians are often proud that they dont), and the amount you pay is determined almost entirely by your income, which the payouts are often inversely proportional to.

The presence of some insurance effect does not negate redistribution which numerically dwarfs it. The point, though valid in principle, is irrelevant to complaints made about actually existing government budgets.

When we talk about social welfare programs, what we're really talking about is insurance. You may say that you work hard, etc., etc. and will never need these policies, but that's about as ingenuous as saying that you're a really good driver and thus don't need liability insurance. You may say that the people who receive the greatest benefit from welfare policies pay the least into it, but how much you receive in insurance payouts is only loosely related to how much you pay in.

I think that's definitely a model of welfare that can be used to describe a high-trust society, but I don't think it's particularly accurate in defection-heavy, low trust societies that exist today. In the UK for example, half a million people between the ages of 16 and 24 have literally never worked (and are not in education). Their welfare payments are not insurance payouts for people who have paid in but who have fallen on hard times. They have never paid in, and they've been claiming from the day they were eligible. And of the entire working age population, a full 25% are on benefits.

I'd be fine if a had a literal insurance system of unemployment, provided by the private sector and which people had to pay premiums to receive. What we have is a simple transfer from the (shrinking) productive part of the population to the unproductive part, and we pretend it's an insurance system.

Unemployment is similar to insurance in the US. You pay in every paycheck, and get defined benefits for a defined period of time if you lose your job.

Other welfare programs are different of course where there’s no need to pay in.

But yeah you should probably leave the UK it sounds awful there for a number of reasons.

But yeah you should probably leave the UK it sounds awful there for a number of reasons.

That seems like somewhat of an overreaction, like Reddit advice threads that always conclude 'you should leave your boyfriend'.

I'm not going to quit my job, abandon my family and friends, sell my house and uproot my wife and child because the unemployed welfare system is too generous. As much as we moan, the UK is still one of the richest and safest countries in the world.

Part of the iterated problem is that some people will leave, and those are the people most willing to take a risk and make sacrifices for a better life, which in the long run reasonably approximates more successful people. We are now witnessing the result of some four hundred years of this process.

Unfortunately, we've run out of places to go.

Yet I've never once heard a conservative suggest that cities should direct more police resources toward patrolling wealthy communities and less towards poorer communities with higher crime rates.

That’s how it used to work, then civil rights groups spent twenty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were under-policed. When it finally changed they spent the next thirty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were overpoliced because it turns out policing involves arresting people, and most of the criminals in those communities were locals.

For the record, that's more on the civil rights groups than the people they're supposed to represent. Wanting less policing is a minority position among all groups, notably blacks. Most are happy with the current levels, and with the exception of Asian Americans, "more policing" is more favorable than "less policing."

In other words, a group that was entitled to government assistance that would largely be paid for by someone else argued that they didn't need as much of it as was publicly assumed. In any other context, the conservative reaction would be to hold them up as paragons of virtue who were willing to be self-reliant and solve their own problems without the assistance of government. But in this particular context that was totally unacceptable, and they insisted that these groups accept as much of their assistance as they deemed necessary.

I don't think so. As far as I can tell, what progressives want from a police force is to limit the negative externalities of crime to the victims without limiting the negative externalities to the perpetrators (optionally, provided the perpetrators are of the appropriate skin tone). Because these two goals are obviously mutually exclusive (yes, having an active police presence in a neighbourhood might discourage crime, but in practice the only way to deal with criminals is by arresting them and sending them to prison), progressives are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's a bit like a thermostat: when the rate of crime gets high enough, they will complain about police officers being too busy sitting on their asses eating donuts to actually do their jobs. When it drops, they will immediately pivot to complaining about police brutality, "driving while black", BLM and so on. Sometimes they'll even manage to complain about under- and over-policing at the same time, somehow.

It is possible to underpolice and overpolice at the same time. It's the equivalent of anarcho-tyranny. You can underpolice against criminals and overpolice against basically innocent people (which is what "driving while black" means). You can even overpolice and underpolice against criminals at the same time if you don't catch enough of them but are brutal towards the ones you do catch.

Of course it's possible. I just don't really believe overpolicing is happening in the US to any significant degree. Progressive complaints about alleged overpolicing in the US generally tend to boil down to incredulity over the idea that different ethnic groups could commit crimes at different rates, and hence that the different arrest rates between different ethnic groups must be indicative of systemic bias (and hence overpolicing) on the part of the police.

Unfortunately in the meantime the CIA had decided they wanted to be their own independent nation state, and determined that the best way to do that was to flood a bunch of communities with cheap cocaine. So you had urban drug paramilitaries forming, and those areas started to become everyone’s problem.

I'm not sure what the hell you're talking about.

The CIA created the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The twofold purpose was to destroy black Americans, and to create a massive war chest free of Congressional oversight. Then they did it to white Americans 20 years later with the fentanyl epidemic and blamed China (and now recently Venezuela). People with their heads firmly lodged up their asses refer to this as a “conspiracy theory”, a term the CIA invented to shame people for paying attention.

Then they did it to white Americans 20 years later with the fentanyl epidemic and blamed China (and now recently Venezuela). People with their heads firmly lodged up their asses refer to this as a “conspiracy theory”

Something about proactively providing evidence for inflammatory claims.

Is this before or after Yakub created white people?

Depends if you're a Reformist or Orthodox NOI member.

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