Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

Government paternalism is terrifying. People are going to screw up, and make bad choices, but having choices is better than being treated like a child your entire life.

View on HN

As Andrew Yang rightly said "nobody has ever wondered if shareholders would screw up, make bad choices, when receiving their dividends".

And this is the right way to look at it. In addition to being a free agent, every citizen should be treated as a shareholder in the nation.

no company that has costs well above revenue for decades is paying out dividends.

But many companies have debt that they just roll over. Not many companies aim to be debt free, because it is not necessarily a good goal. You need capital, and optimise its mix. At current rates, issuing debt is attractive.

I have friends who didn't pay for their house. They were lucky enough that their parents just gave it to them.

So bad to be treated like a child for their entire life. They're really suffering not having a mortgage to pay every month. Instead they're saving up for their kids college.

Providing free healthcare, free education and free food to those who need it is quite different from being treated like a child.

Especially if they end up in a higher tax bracket.

It's not government paternalism that's terrifying, but cultural demonisation and paternalistic contempt for the poor, combined with unthinking adulation of the extremely rich.

The winner (re)writes the history, so that the narrative makes one the good guy.

Doubly so when a large fraction of the people receiving free healthcare, free education, and free food are, in fact, children.

Means testing is paternalism. Just giving the poor straight cash and leaving it up to them to use that to get back on their feet is probably the least paternalistic strategy I can think of that isn't just cruel and results in systemically and permanently disenfranchising large parts of the population for bad luck.

Giving people public access to healthcare, education, and food gives them more choices in life- not less.

Speaking of children, that’s who’s gonna starve if you decide to let them suffer the consequences of their parents’ poor choices. I would have personally starved to death dozens of times over if not for food stamps.

You might have been more hungry, but death by starvation in the USA is nearly unheard of. I personally have never heard of anyone - homeless or otherwise - dying of starvation in the USA. The only people I've heard of dying of starvation were stranded on a mountain or on the ocean or something.

"Well, at least there aren't a lot of people literally starving to death" isn't exactly a glowing endorsement of the system.

Especially in the UK, where there literally are people starving to death now.

People in the US who live in a comfortable six-figure-middle-class bubble really have no idea how precarious their position is.

All it takes is one expensive long-lasting serious illness and they'll be out on the street with the other people who "made poor choices."

> All it takes is one expensive long-lasting serious illness and they'll be out on the street with the other people who "made poor choices."

You declare bankruptcy, your assets are divided up among your creditors and you start over again. That's why bankruptcy exists. Several (most?) states even let one keep one's home. Maybe we need a law to prevent landlords from refusing to let based on prior bankruptcy — would have to think that through. Bankruptcy is not (or at least should not be) the end of the world.

It's hard to start over out of a box.

You won't see death by starvation. You'll see something like death by flu after malnutrition weakens immunity, or death by overdose after malnutrition weakens decisionmaking.

Starvation isn't literal in this context. One can intellectually starve a child. One can have a child be stagnant in their growth, for example by not having them play.

Oh sure, I suppose my family could have lived digging through landfills like the wretchedly poor do in Ethiopia and Indonesia and elsewhere. And perhaps I wouldn’t have died, just been left permanently physically and mentally stunted by malnutrition, certainly not coming out of the ordeal in any state to perform the fairly high-level job that I have today. The income taxes that I pay with the large-ish salary that I was able to get because my brain was not stunted by malnutrition as a child have already paid for the food stamps that the government invested in my well-being many times over, by the way. That is what welfare does: it works, and in the long run it pays off in spades.

Food stamps don't prevent children from suffering the consequences of their parents poor choices; people can and do trade those benefits for other things.

Children also get to suffer for policymakers poor choices of what the stamps should be spent on, and taxpayers get to suffer the cost of every benefit program duplicating income verification functions and other eligibility functions rather than having universal programs where the tax system takes care of the better off not getting unfair share of benefit.

I’m telling you that in my lived experience, food stamps filled my belly and prevented me from dying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com