I dislike conflating "Socialism" an idea bout who should own what, with redistribution..
Actually I think we coud do a lot more redistribution of consumption from those who are temporarily in circumstances and a stage of life with relatively low needed to those who are temporarily in circumstances and a stage of life with reactively high needs. I'd be happy to use a broad based consumption tax to transfer to the ill, the unemployed, the really aged the family with children.
I see no conflict between that and the most Hayekian Neoliberal Capitalism.
Nor does redistributive Capitalism have to stop there, The state can be finance with a progressive consumption tax with consumption credit at the lower end.
Ah I just realized the consumption tax does somewhat get around bad incentives since it’s hard to specificallly target specific demographics with spending
I'm thinking transfer spending is the life stage/circumstances. It is lifetime redistributional only in that being sicker than average or more unemployed than average means lower lifetime income. Cf the EITC is purely redistributional from those paying high tax rates to those paying a negative rate.
I mostly agree but one appeal of the free markets position is that it’s an easy bright line that gets around the problem of bad political incentives by giving the state virtually no power in most areas. But I think you’re right that if we have to fund some public goods using collective action (at least military), we would want the collective power to turn up or down the lever of taxes. A rule for the amount of redistribution (so long as it actually isn’t trivially easy to change that ) doesn’t seem more than a step from there.
My question is- why HAVEN’T we achieved this Star Trek like abundance at this point? It’s not very Greatest Nation On Earth of us not to have that figured out by now.
One reason I think I have to routinely fight personal tendencies to believe things like “they have a secret cure for cancer but it’s only for the ultra elite” is that the order of importance is all out of whack- if all the REAL problems of the world aren’t already solved but it’s being withheld then why have the smartest people in our nation been fooling around making stupid phones and social media companies when there are real issues still to be solved?
Well written! But, IMPO, the USA has had centralized private sector central planning for decades (after having trended towards it for a long time before that), there are quite meaningful ways in which that is better than its purely state driven alternate, but IMPO its still much worse than our prior system which was much more decentralized and had quite strong and deep competitive market structures that generated far more competition, growth, innovation and scientific advancement.
Parts of this (e.g., how the US and Nordic countries aren't analogous) make it seem like you only disagree with deBoer about whether the conditions are ripe/fitting in the US for implementing socialist-ish redistribution rather than disagree with him about his underlying argument. Would you concede that some mix of economic maturity, tepid growth prospects, inequality, etc. could theoretically justify his perspective?
Actually I’m disappointed that that’s what this comes across that because I don’t believe that at all. The Star Trek utopia point was basically to illustrate that we don’t need to and should not arbitrarily decide to redistribute. Letting capitalism work means letting it work, if welfare is what you care about . Wealth isn’t the right metric to focus on
This argument that socialism is stealing from future generations possibly doesn't work if you believe we are about to undergo fertility collapse. If the company's long-term prospects aren't hot, it's time to start issuing dividends.
I think at the current moment, the best argument against socialism is that even if we decide to stop focusing on productivity, the underlying need for competition due to being pre-post-scarcity doesn't go away. At which point, if any other countries continue to meritocratically promote the smartest our society of equitable distribution will eventually exist only at their mercy, the equivalent of some Amazonian hunter-gatherer society.
Well, if by fertility collapse, you assume we can do nothing about it and are doomed, then that's reason for nihilism sure and I don't care for socialism much in that scenario either. But if you're looking to slow down the damage from fertility collapse or counteract in some way, we need to substitute labor not just in the production process but also in the idea generation process. Fertility collapse folks should spend more of their time fighting AI doomerism.
Yeah, so I don't actually believe that, I was channeling my inner Malcolm Collins. Basically what I was getting at is that, depending on their views on population ethics, your analysis actually leads to two diverging but coherent worldviews: anti-natalist communist, or e/acc pronatalist. Which is interesting because those are actually two common tendencies within either of those groups.
I dislike conflating "Socialism" an idea bout who should own what, with redistribution..
Actually I think we coud do a lot more redistribution of consumption from those who are temporarily in circumstances and a stage of life with relatively low needed to those who are temporarily in circumstances and a stage of life with reactively high needs. I'd be happy to use a broad based consumption tax to transfer to the ill, the unemployed, the really aged the family with children.
I see no conflict between that and the most Hayekian Neoliberal Capitalism.
Nor does redistributive Capitalism have to stop there, The state can be finance with a progressive consumption tax with consumption credit at the lower end.
Ah I just realized the consumption tax does somewhat get around bad incentives since it’s hard to specificallly target specific demographics with spending
I'm thinking transfer spending is the life stage/circumstances. It is lifetime redistributional only in that being sicker than average or more unemployed than average means lower lifetime income. Cf the EITC is purely redistributional from those paying high tax rates to those paying a negative rate.
I mostly agree but one appeal of the free markets position is that it’s an easy bright line that gets around the problem of bad political incentives by giving the state virtually no power in most areas. But I think you’re right that if we have to fund some public goods using collective action (at least military), we would want the collective power to turn up or down the lever of taxes. A rule for the amount of redistribution (so long as it actually isn’t trivially easy to change that ) doesn’t seem more than a step from there.
My question is- why HAVEN’T we achieved this Star Trek like abundance at this point? It’s not very Greatest Nation On Earth of us not to have that figured out by now.
One reason I think I have to routinely fight personal tendencies to believe things like “they have a secret cure for cancer but it’s only for the ultra elite” is that the order of importance is all out of whack- if all the REAL problems of the world aren’t already solved but it’s being withheld then why have the smartest people in our nation been fooling around making stupid phones and social media companies when there are real issues still to be solved?
Well written! But, IMPO, the USA has had centralized private sector central planning for decades (after having trended towards it for a long time before that), there are quite meaningful ways in which that is better than its purely state driven alternate, but IMPO its still much worse than our prior system which was much more decentralized and had quite strong and deep competitive market structures that generated far more competition, growth, innovation and scientific advancement.
Parts of this (e.g., how the US and Nordic countries aren't analogous) make it seem like you only disagree with deBoer about whether the conditions are ripe/fitting in the US for implementing socialist-ish redistribution rather than disagree with him about his underlying argument. Would you concede that some mix of economic maturity, tepid growth prospects, inequality, etc. could theoretically justify his perspective?
Actually I’m disappointed that that’s what this comes across that because I don’t believe that at all. The Star Trek utopia point was basically to illustrate that we don’t need to and should not arbitrarily decide to redistribute. Letting capitalism work means letting it work, if welfare is what you care about . Wealth isn’t the right metric to focus on
This argument that socialism is stealing from future generations possibly doesn't work if you believe we are about to undergo fertility collapse. If the company's long-term prospects aren't hot, it's time to start issuing dividends.
I think at the current moment, the best argument against socialism is that even if we decide to stop focusing on productivity, the underlying need for competition due to being pre-post-scarcity doesn't go away. At which point, if any other countries continue to meritocratically promote the smartest our society of equitable distribution will eventually exist only at their mercy, the equivalent of some Amazonian hunter-gatherer society.
Well, if by fertility collapse, you assume we can do nothing about it and are doomed, then that's reason for nihilism sure and I don't care for socialism much in that scenario either. But if you're looking to slow down the damage from fertility collapse or counteract in some way, we need to substitute labor not just in the production process but also in the idea generation process. Fertility collapse folks should spend more of their time fighting AI doomerism.
Yeah, so I don't actually believe that, I was channeling my inner Malcolm Collins. Basically what I was getting at is that, depending on their views on population ethics, your analysis actually leads to two diverging but coherent worldviews: anti-natalist communist, or e/acc pronatalist. Which is interesting because those are actually two common tendencies within either of those groups.