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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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While I agree with your point and generally am opposed to simply handwaving away all the details on how exactly we will par for things, I think the USA might actually be an example where this is true.

The state has immense resources at it's disposal, and almost certainly could give a comfortable life to everyone if it tried to do so without raising taxes or the like.. Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

It’s simply not a solveable problem in aggregate to provide a comfortable life for everyone.

You can provide a comfortable life for everyone who didn’t defect plus the wealthiest 1-2% who did. But lots of people hit defect, including in ways that seem sympathetic, and getting them to a comfortable life uses more resources than they generate. And the more comfortable everyone’s life is, the more resources it uses.

Let’s take the hypothetical childless septuagenarian moving into a nursing home. If he can’t afford the platinum plan, you can’t make him comfortable. And it’s worth noting that the platinum plan’s cost has as its main input the cost of low/semi skill labor- the more comfortable CNA’s are, the more it costs to keep our septuagenarian comfortable. There’s discussion on the tyranny of the rocket equation, but this is the tyranny of the diaper-changing equation.

I like the comparison to the rocket equation, but I still think the US is wealthy enough to make it work. US GDP works out to around 70k per person per year, which means it's a distribution and priority problem. The reality of the modern world is that one person putting in the effort can generate the resources to provide for 100 who hit defect. Is the problem easy to solve? No, but it's definitely possible (okay fine, maybe not to 100% completion, but 90% even would be fine.)

I would argue it shouldn't be solved, but that's a different matter.

It's only a "distribution and priority problem" if you assume doing the redistribution doesn't change the total. it does.

Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

Isn't cost disease and corruption literally the hardest thing to cut in a democracy?

It feels like we'd need a crisis on the order of WWII to meaningfully move the needle on these things. Even then, I'm not hopeful. The last crisis (Covid) seemed to accelerate this form of corruption.

In a democracy generally? I don't think so. In our current state? Probably yeah.

I guess I just don't move problems that are in the "We could solve this if the leadership actually attempted to solve it" bin over to the "Literally impossible to solve" bin just because there's currently no political will to solve it.

COVID didn't work because it didn't really threaten the people who mattered. There was a small chance of dying for many of them, sure, but no chance of losing their high positions (which is far worse.) A proper war would do it I think, or a real severe resource shortage. Maybe a civil war even.

Covid wasn't on the order of WW2. It was very overblown, it was presented as a disaster when it was really almost a nothingburger. That kind of thing just lets the bureaucracy grab more power.

A true life-or-death situation like WW2, for all its awfulness, demands that you shape up. Look at the Soviet Union for example, after a few humiliating defeats, Stalin threw out almost all the ideology that had so dominated the 1930s. Poverty was no problem, even famines were no problem, ideology came first, but once the Nazis were threatening to conquer the whole mess, it really was a matter of survival, and Stalin stopped caring about ideology, only about what worked.

That said, you don't want such desperate circumstances instead of what we have now.