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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

I never understood this logic, and I understand it even less now. If we have the industrial / economic capacity to provide everyone with necessities of life (food, water, heat, shelter, ...), why not just provide that directly?! No need to go via the "money -> essentials" route... that way you're only indirectly making landlords and grocery store owners rich.

For this crisis, people are saying, give $1000 to everyone... that money is mostly going to find its way into the pockets of already rich people, and/or those companies that should have collapsed because of bad planning, but now won't. Instead, you could legislate things like food stamps for everyone (with the government paying grocers directly, while at the same time ensuring the money isn't spent on shit like alcohol and cigarettes), and a few months of rent amnesty for everyone (including businesses) (it's not like houses will disappear if somebody doesn't pay the rent).

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I don’t see there being any material difference in providing cash vs providing food stamps / rent amnesty.

Either way, government money (ie. tax money) will be funnelled to, in your words, “already rich people”.

Your way is probably worse, because it forces governments to pick winners, which they are notoriously bad at doing.

> If we have the industrial / economic capacity to provide everyone with necessities of life (food, water, heat, shelter, ...), why not just provide that directly?!

Because my utility function isn't the same as yours, so outside of goods and services where there is strong reason to believe that the conditions do not exist for markets to work, it's better to provide people fungible currency and allow them to maximize their own utility function through purchasing decisions rather than have a centralized bureaucracy decide what they most need. Also because despite the aforementioned variability in utility functions, agency seems to pretty consistently be positively valued, so centrally imposed selection would be inefficient in utilitarian terms even if it perfectly reflected the recipients utility function before considering agency.

> and a few months of rent amnesty for everyone (including businesses) (it's not like houses will disappear if somebody doesn't pay the rent).

This is being proposed where I live. I'm curious to know who, in this situation, pays the owners of the rental properties for the use of the house, for the expenses and maintenance, for the employees, plumbers, electricians, and contractors, etc. And what about lost profits due for the assumption of the risk of buying properties for the purpose of providing homes for people to live?

There’s a lot of research on this in the effective charity set. See [1].

First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on.

Second, it takes a huge bureaucracy to manage and enforce controls. Folks still sell their food stamps.

1: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/07/5416096...

> First, it is highly paternalistic to tell people what to spend money on.

Indeed, and that's kind-of the point: (1) you eliminate bullshit spending (on things like alcohol, tobacco, lottery) that many people are prone to do, but that they arguably shouldn't (to some extent, those products are "predatory"); (2) it provides a minimal standard (survival) yet incentivizes people to work (be productive) to increase their standard of living (e.g. to be able to buy alcohol); (3) avoids inflation, as only a very limited set of products would be affected by increased demand (in particular, not real estate, as "free" housing would only be available in government-owned real estate) that the government can plan in advance.

My prior is that "bureaucracy" can be reduced significantly with modern IT technologies.

> eliminate bullshit spending (on things like alcohol, tobacco, lottery)

How do you propose to prevent people acquiring drugs, and gambling?

I don't! I fully support people's freedom to spend their own money for anything they want! Just not the tax-payer's money, that's why I'm in favor of things like food-stamps (that could only be exchanged for some "basic" staples), government-provided housing, ...

> For this crisis, people are saying, give $1000 to everyone... that money is mostly going to find its way into the pockets of already rich people

Whose pockets do you think it's going to come out of, whether by taxes or inflation (which is a tax on holders of dollar denominated assets). It's just doing more work for other people along the way.

> Whose pockets do you think it's going to come out of

Well, if America just reversed the past 3 years of tax policy, that money would come out of the pockets of the top 1%, primarily. That's people earning more than $400k a year.

As it is, we are going backwards. The government is literally borrowing money now to give money back, in droves, to rich people, instead of to poorer and middle class people.

> If we have the industrial / economic capacity to provide everyone with necessities of life (food, water, heat, shelter, ...), why not just provide that directly?!

People prefer money to buy their own food over government-issued turnips.

Government (i.e. productive, working tax-payers) should provide for people's needs, people should work to provide for their own wants ("preferences")

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