I’m a leftist with some sympathy for libertarianism. I don’t know how typical my views are of left-leaning people on LW, but I’d guess they aren’t absurdly far from typical.
I’m all in favour of redistribution. If by “expropriation” you mean tweaking the tax rates then I’m in favour of that too, with the proviso that I’d want to take a really hard look at the relevant history and economic theory before tweaking them too hard. If you mean something more coercive—large-scale confiscation of property, say—then quite aside from the question of whether it could be just, it would be destabilizing and divisive. Not to mention that in order to do enough good to be worth even considering, it would need to be a really big expropriation.
Part of why I favour a somewhat-paternalistic regulatory state is because in many cases regulation benefits everyone overall by solving coordination problems, and governments are best placed (in status, coercive power, perceived legitimacy, resources, etc.) to solve them in this way. (This is mostly a separate issue from helping the poor.)
The other part is that in many cases where regulation doesn’t benefit everyone, it does provide a clear overall benefit, but the people it benefits have relatively little economic power and therefore markets will settle on equilibria that are worse overall. Roughly, markets solve the problem “maximize net utility weighted by wealth” and I would prefer to solve something nearer to “maximize net utility with equal weight for everyone”. An alternative way to deal with this problem would be to redistribute enough that the differences in economic power go away, but it seems like this would need a really big redistribution, much too big to look either practical or just to me. (This one is about helping the poor, and the reason why giving them money instead won’t do is that they’d need to be given an infeasibly large amount of money.)
I would love to see something like a basic income guarantee. I think it could replace a lot of existing state benefits. Not all; sometimes people suffer terrible things that are very expensive to deal with, and I think governments are well placed to act as insurers in some such cases.
[EDITED to remove parentheses, which I overuse when writing hastily. No substantive changes made.]
Roughly, markets solve the problem “maximize net utility weighted by wealth” and I would prefer to solve something nearer to “maximize net utility with equal weight for everyone”.
Heath insurance programs take extremely expensive costs in the grounds of welfare state policies. To people, is inconceivable to live with private investiments in heath. The compulsive taxes make everyone pay, and only a few are aware of the monetary costs.
Maybe in other sectors welfare state policies end well, but I doubt this happen frequently.
An interesting choice of example. The USA is just about the only otherwise-civilized state that largely leaves healthcare in private hands, and “only a few are aware” (as you put it) that the US government spends about as much per capita on healthcare as, say, the UK government—to be more precise: only two other OECD countries have more government spending on healthcare than the US—and that total US healthcare expenditure is hugely more than that of any other country, and yet its actual outcomes are pretty much on a par with all those other countries that are spending so much less. (E.g., if you order countries by life expectancy at birth, the US comes in at about #50.)
Of course this is a complicated business, obviously affected by other things besides the public/private difference. But, to say the least, the available evidence doesn’t offer much support for the idea that a welfare state providing health insurance ends up being more expensive and less efficient. The only good example we’ve got of taking a different approach goes quite the other way.
I’m a leftist with some sympathy for libertarianism. I don’t know how typical my views are of left-leaning people on LW, but I’d guess they aren’t absurdly far from typical.
I’m all in favour of redistribution. If by “expropriation” you mean tweaking the tax rates then I’m in favour of that too, with the proviso that I’d want to take a really hard look at the relevant history and economic theory before tweaking them too hard. If you mean something more coercive—large-scale confiscation of property, say—then quite aside from the question of whether it could be just, it would be destabilizing and divisive. Not to mention that in order to do enough good to be worth even considering, it would need to be a really big expropriation.
Part of why I favour a somewhat-paternalistic regulatory state is because in many cases regulation benefits everyone overall by solving coordination problems, and governments are best placed (in status, coercive power, perceived legitimacy, resources, etc.) to solve them in this way. (This is mostly a separate issue from helping the poor.)
The other part is that in many cases where regulation doesn’t benefit everyone, it does provide a clear overall benefit, but the people it benefits have relatively little economic power and therefore markets will settle on equilibria that are worse overall. Roughly, markets solve the problem “maximize net utility weighted by wealth” and I would prefer to solve something nearer to “maximize net utility with equal weight for everyone”. An alternative way to deal with this problem would be to redistribute enough that the differences in economic power go away, but it seems like this would need a really big redistribution, much too big to look either practical or just to me. (This one is about helping the poor, and the reason why giving them money instead won’t do is that they’d need to be given an infeasibly large amount of money.)
I would love to see something like a basic income guarantee. I think it could replace a lot of existing state benefits. Not all; sometimes people suffer terrible things that are very expensive to deal with, and I think governments are well placed to act as insurers in some such cases.
[EDITED to remove parentheses, which I overuse when writing hastily. No substantive changes made.]
Wow, that’s a fantastic way of phrasing it.
Glad to be of service!
Heath insurance programs take extremely expensive costs in the grounds of welfare state policies. To people, is inconceivable to live with private investiments in heath. The compulsive taxes make everyone pay, and only a few are aware of the monetary costs.
Maybe in other sectors welfare state policies end well, but I doubt this happen frequently.
An interesting choice of example. The USA is just about the only otherwise-civilized state that largely leaves healthcare in private hands, and “only a few are aware” (as you put it) that the US government spends about as much per capita on healthcare as, say, the UK government—to be more precise: only two other OECD countries have more government spending on healthcare than the US—and that total US healthcare expenditure is hugely more than that of any other country, and yet its actual outcomes are pretty much on a par with all those other countries that are spending so much less. (E.g., if you order countries by life expectancy at birth, the US comes in at about #50.)
Of course this is a complicated business, obviously affected by other things besides the public/private difference. But, to say the least, the available evidence doesn’t offer much support for the idea that a welfare state providing health insurance ends up being more expensive and less efficient. The only good example we’ve got of taking a different approach goes quite the other way.