This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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).
Of course it does. The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious.
This is basically the Broken Windows theory writ large.
That relies on the presumption that conservatives seem to have where government spending is nothing but a deadweight loss. You see this in things like "Tax Independence Day", which is the day, usually in late May, where the average American "Stops working for the government and starts working for himself". Except this "working for the government" is really just financing one's own consumption. The idea is as ridiculous as "Mortgage Independence Day", when you "stop working for the bank and start working for yourself". Well, I do pay the bank, but I'm the one living in the house, not the bank manager. By the same token, I spend the first five months of the year driving on highways and sending kids to public school and enjoying police protection and all the other things that are provided by the government. And yes, this includes all the social welfare programs that some assume are for other people, but aren't really; I voluntarily spend a lot of money on insurance that I hope to god I never have to use, and social programs are no different. Are private insurance companies a deadweight economic loss?
No, transfer payments are financing other people's consumption.
Not ridiculous at all; there's a reason there used to be mortgage-burning parties.
Social welfare programs are called "insurance" in order to bolster arguments such as this, but they really aren't. For one thing, if they were like private insurance (other than extremely regulated forms like health insurance), there would be some actual underwriting involved. Premiums would have some relationship to risk. There would likely be policy limits. Incurring a loss deliberately would be fraud; failing to mitigate a loss would also result in loss of benefits. They don't look much like insurance at all, except when insurance is turned through regulation into a social welfare program.
Of course it doesn't resemble private insurance because it only exists to provide coverage that isn't economically feasible for the private market to provide. You listed a number of features that you see in private insurance markets, but none of them are truly essential. You mention premiums based on risk profile and underwriting, but if you found out tomorrow that your car insurance company was charging the same rates to everybody, or charging based on income, you might question their business sense but you wouldn't think that you didn't have insurance. Same with deliberate losses and loss mitigation. Not all policies have loss mitigation requirements (and when they do they're kind of difficult to enforce unless it's something easy and obvious), and the kind of fraud you mention isn't an issue the way the system is currently set up. People aren't intentionally quitting good jobs so they can collect welfare payments, and studies have shown that benefit amounts haven't affected the total number of claims since AFDC was at its peak in 1975.
The whole moral hazard aspect is priced into the system. People intentionally cause losses on auto and homeowners policies because, in many cases, the insurance payout is greater than the amount the asset is worth. If you lose your job and go on public benefits, you aren't getting anywhere near what that job paid, and most of those benefits are going to be restricted to vouchers for specific items. Hard insurance fraud wouldn't be a crime if the maximum you could get was a $3,000 voucher to use at a dealership. This is why I'm not sure what you were getting at with respect to policy limits, since public benefits have pretty clear policy limits, and they're often much lower than the actual cost of the misfortune. At the other end of the spectrum, I would add that making a claim for public benefits is significantly more difficult than making a private insurance claim. Some programs can take months.
Yes you’ve distinguished insurance (ie something that makes economic sense for both the insured and the insurer) with a government subsidy (ie something that on net does not make economic sense).
If the social safety net story actually made people take more risky bets that on balance produced materially higher returns, why couldn’t private insurance cover it?
As Saint Luigi would tell you, it's only supposed to make economic sense for the insurer.
And Luigi would be confusing health insurance (a weird chimera) with real insurance. Take life insurance. Premiums aren’t that expensive. But they help protect a family from an unexpected death. That is, both the insured and insurer are better off. That is, the insured are trading off EV for downside protection (which makes sense giving diminishing marginal returns) while insurer is making the EV positive play and provided there isn’t system bias should come out ahead.
Life insurance may be one of the few markets insurance DOES make sense for both sides. Car insurance is required, so car insurers will, after you make a claim, either raise rates enough to recover the entire claim and then some within a few years, or they'll drop you from their regular company and tell you you can only buy from their high risk "indemnity" company, which costs even more than that. Homeowners insurance used to be worth it to the insured but I'm told they have started to do the same thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link