Comment by wozniacki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wozniacki | Hacker News Reader

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  It means that if I'm doing very well for myself, I'll
  give up a bit more than I would've in a strictly 
  capitalist country. Instead of paying 25-30% tax, I'll 
  pay 50%. 

  And that doesn't matter. If I'm earning 300k+ in a year,
  I can miss it.

  In return I know that my life is safe from being 
  destroyed, regardless of social class I'm born in or
  will move to. My parents don't have any money? It doesn't
  matter, education is free. If I have or get some 
  disability, I will be taken care of. If I get injured, I
  will be taken care of. If I get sick, I will be taken 
  care of. By the community.

Here, I'm only referring to the sensible, politically astute contingent of Americans who yet don't warm up to socialism or even high taxation for that matter. I'm not talking about the impulsively right-leaning lot here.

I think such Americans genuinely question if such a smooth trade off - between paying a good chunk more in taxes and a proportionate increase in the standard of living of those on whom that increase in taxation is supposed to benefit - is ever possible in a government that is rife with dysfunction, graft and bewildering inefficiencies at every level. The examples of this present themselves at regular frequencies - say the botched roll out of the healthcare website [1] a few years ago - in the glare of the American media, which don't exactly help either.

Further exacerbating this problem is that bright young Americans [2] don't want to serve in the public sector in similar rates as in Northern Europe.

[1] Obamacare Website Costs Exceed $2 Billion, Study Finds

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare-...

[2] 'Pro-Government' Millennials Take Government Jobs, Discover They Suck, Move to the Private Sector

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/17/millennials-take-governmen...

> If I get sick, I will be taken care of. By the community.

Socialism (miniscule s) in the small is charity, forms of which even the most rigid egoist (e.g. Rand) can find ideologically palatable: intentional, contractual communities are communities nonetheless, and generally contain mutual aid clauses. Scale matters, however, and somewhere between 150 and 100 million other persons, the charity co-ordinating entity (i.e. the governing power) becomes a beast unto itself, the contract becomes blurred, and Socialism in the large imposes itself on ideological dissenters with the force of the local violence monopolist.

If nation-states were actually communities caring for their own, the philosophical concerns of consent and compulsion, and the pragmatic concerns of checks and balances, would be much reduced. I await the Maneki Neko experiment that could imbue a society of great magnitude with equally great cohesion.

>I await the Maneki Neko experiment that could imbue a society of great magnitude with equally great cohesion.

That'd be the internet. We just need to figure out the right software to run on it.

> is ever possible in a government that is rife with dysfunction, graft and bewildering inefficiencies at every level.

This is a fair point, but I think we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the presence of a significant group of politicians in congress who have made their entire careers out of sabotaging government programs. Remember, Republicans have tried to repeal Obamacare at every turn, even taking it to the Supreme Court - twice.

So to say the system can never work because it hasn't worked is confusing the cause for the effect, it seems.

As far as I recall the Obama Healthcare Website was not developed by the government. It was developed by a private company. The front end was developed by Development Seed and the backend was developed by a multi-national.

That's what I mean about propaganda. To say this is the doing of socialism is pure propaganda.

As long as it is state funded I see no difference. I bet if it would have been developed by the `state engineers` it would even fail worse.

If it was State run then you could say hey the State failed to deliver. This was a private company which failed to deliver. And the private company, if you actually look it up subcontracted it, so you can't say hey there was no private Capitalist oversight over the project, you know greed to make things run efficiently.

But even subcontractors on government projects are subject to the same limitations as the prime contractor. So many limitations and increased overhead are imposed on government contractors, it's not surprising government projects fail in ways a similar private project would not with similar funding.

State engineers we do have (Army Corps of Engineers, NASA) often do a fantastic job.

Government IT has a huge impedance mismatch in the interface from the government agency to the contractors.

Specific to "Obamacare"/the ACA, America missed the move to "socialized medicine" immediately post-WWII. Europe had significant disruption because of seven years of tanks and bombers. There was during the Truman Administration a "wage and price freeze" in place to avoid a phantom anticipated inflation. Employer-based insurance and other "perks" were given tax protected status instead.

And for a long time, this turned out to be a more effective system. But accumulated rent-seeking and other problems rendered it less cost effective over time.

It's amazing how libertarians and others who see free market and the invisible hand as sacrosanct principles don't see how rent-seeking[1] including the private ownership of land is antithetical to those very principles.

Libertarians claim far too much as "the product of their labor." Firstly, they immensely overvalue their individual contribution to a product and undervalue the contribution of all who came before them. Secondly, the finite natural resources and space (land) of the planet can NEVER be considered the product of anyone's labor, and thus can NEVER be treated as private property in any strict sense (exclusive ownership in perpetuity until sold, zero property or inheritance tax). The later point is conceded by Geolibertarians[2][3] and Georgists[4].

The notion of perpetual ownership of any finite resource is antithetical to the principles of the free-market, because it allows one to purchase an infinite amount of something (i.e. perpetual rights to a piece of land, including perpetual rent collection) for a finite sum.

-

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[2] http://geolib.com/welcome.html

[3] Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076632

[4] http://povertythinkagain.com/controversies/a-word-from-the-s...

I agree - rents are poorly understood. I read epic flamefests on nntp://sci.econ during the last 20 years and that is the only reason I "got it".

Sadly, I have to differ on multiple other points:

- Substitution pretty much makes resource constraints a nonproblem. We've gotten so good at this that there's a large trade in "antiques" largely based on the numismatic value of old materials.

Whether or not the carbon content of the atmosphere counts is a very slowly closing but still open question. Having dealt with CARB, the California Air Resources Board, the probability of an honest solution based on public goods seems bleak.

- The planet very well can be largely private. Let it be private and tax the rents. This leaves more open the question "what does government do?". Consider private and public as merely possible management - or finance - schemes, each with weak and strong points.

- Perpetual ownership is just a lease with an undefined term. The British renewal rate of 99 years as a standard is just using a different constant.

Of course people overvalue their contributions. It takes a long time to get calibrated properly. And when I was a kid, the grownups were a lot more likely to be blunt about this than I am led to believe they are now.

But Libertarians are still the "R&D" department for politics.

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