OT. Harm from the Welfare state

Welfare is absolutely perfect. Everybody gets to be paid to do nothing productive and nobody gets to pay the piper. And Ben B. gets to toss funny money out of his private helicopter. Furthermore the loafers get to vote and the few workers then get no say because they are outvoted. The COLOR here is "green".

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There are a couple of minor factual errors in this proposition.

Welfare isn't paid to everybody. You've got to demonstrate that you need it first. For some odd reason - I'm sure that some right-wing economic genius will explain it to us - it is only paid out to a small proportion of the population at any one time. On the other hand, the entire tax-paying population gets to pay the piper.

If this were an exam, you'd have failed.

Really? He should have access to real money. And the helicopter seems to have been Milton Friedman's metaphorical device, rather than one that Ben Bernanke might claim as his own.

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Don't call somebody who is out of work a loafer - if you haven't got anything to do you aren't loafing. The absence of something that you ought to be doing takes all the fun out of it.

And if the unemployed outnumber the workers, you've probably got a Republican administration. Admittedly even Hoover didn't do that badly

- unemployment only got up to 25% in 1933 - but he wasn't as barking mad as the Tea Party.

The thinking here is inadequate.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I didn't *SAY* that. I never brought class into it. I deny Marx' class theory outright...

Through jiggery-pokery. You cannot design a scheme for people to behave in. It's equivalent to directing a movie with *that many* actors all reading lines at once...

It's defacto information-impossible. You'll make it *worse*.

That is the point.

Hypothetically, yes. Under some constraints.

it's a fetish.

It depends on how that market pays off, and how much of a factor of production labor is for that product.

I'm not even *arguing* morality; I am arguing optimality.

The incentives to be The Guy who proves it are significant, and there are competent people doing the work.

The "schade" means "false"; it stands for the theatrical aspects of thing.

See Rene Girard.

So there's no proof it works. We're then prepared to operate on pure suspicion.

Hello?

Feh. We'll see what that means. Just to reverse myself :), we may well *need* a touch of socialism of some sort.

I have no idea what that would mean in practice. But my, I'm skeptical of it.

I couldn't agree more. MY, that sounds Monetarist.

yes.

*Most*? Nebraska hit 100, 150 years ago. 100 years ago in earnest, for a real game changer ( when the Ukraine famine hit ).

Right. i agree.

That's true. I am amazed nobody did a photomultiplier like that before...

The USA buys oil on the spot market just like everybody else...

-- Les Cargill

Perhaps. But your anxieties about socialism are all about one group in society - the recipients of welfare - ripping off an other group - those who pay most of the tax bill.

Calling them the working class and the upper class doesn't make any difference to the argument, and your objecting to that particular nomenclature seems to have more to do with your desire to establish your ideological purity than any desire to clarify the issue. I find it hard to imagine why you feel the need to abjure Marx again - there's no prospect that your output here is going to be reviewed by some revived committee for un-American activities

Welfare isn't doing anything complicated. It's feeding the hungry and educating and retraining people who wouldn't otherwise get educated or retrained. It isn't as if this involves them being diverted from doing something marginally useful.

The tax money that pays for it has been diverted from people who could use it, but we know that they won't - in practice - invest it that particular way. It's one of the areas where the free market doesn't optimise the distribution of resources.

It's a point that depends on the - invalid - assumption that the free market is the best possible way of distributing resources. If this were true, we'd buy our defence from mercenary companies (which has been tried - and ends up with the mercenary companies ruling the state that they were bough tin to defend).

Actually, it works in practice. The major constraint is that it needs persistent public interest in what's being done, how effectively the recipients are being helped, and how efficiently the money invested is being applied to solving the problems that need fixing. Without that kind of interest you can find yourself funding a sprawling bureaucracy that spends most its time checking its own performance rather than helping the people who need help.

Some people have unrealistic faith in the process, in the same way that James Arthur is irrationally sceptical its effectiveness. There's a rational majority who can see that it works, and works better than any other scheme on offer.

And how effectively labour is organised. Capital has the initiative when it comes to negotiating wages and setting up new plants and industries. Without trade unions - or government regulation - capital can always divide and conquer, and this tactical advantage works to their strategic disadvantage because they won't invest enough in the workers whom they don't control - who can always take the "human capital" they represent across the road to some competing capitalist.

Not so that I've noticed. You do seem to share James Arthur's delusion that the free market is the best way of distributing resources in every situation, but you don't seem to bother making the point explicitly, though it does seem to be implied by a lot of your caveats.

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And there are competent people looking for the theory of everything, but we've been stuck on string theory for a couple of decades now. Incentives don't make things happen, though they can be helpful with tractable problems. With currently intractable problems, most of the people would be better employed doing something else, and the incentives are distorting the market.

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You obviously don't know any German, and - since schadenfreude is now a loan word in English - your facility with Englsh isn't what it ought to be

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So it's a well-established silly idea? Does that make it any less silly?

The socialist scheme of running society with higher tax take from the well-off paying for more investment in the poor and the children of the poor is perfectly rational. It uses the power of government to correct an imperfection in the free market mechanism which leads employers to invest less in their - mobile - work force than they invest in their static machinery and plant.

You and James Arthur may want to think that this is merely a cover for some some underlying desire to play Robin Hood, but that doesn't make the rational justification for the approach any less persuasive.

In exactly the same way that we operate on scientific hypotheses - which can never be proven to be true, but are accepted until falsified. The suspicion that spending money on election advertising helps win elections is a widely shared hypothesis. Advertising is obviously one of the various different factors that affect the outcomes of elections, but nobody has yet falsified the hypothesis that it helps your candidate to spend more on advertising the virtues of your candidate and the defects of rival candidates.

Irrationally sceptical.

I'm just reporting what the local newspapers say.

So what. Nebraska has always been marginal agricultural land.

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When it can't sign long term contracts, or can't get enough oil under long term contracts. The invasion of Irak does seem to have been largely motivated by the hope that it could be made into a second Saudi Arabia. That's worked out even less well than the CIA's earlier initiatives in Iran.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen