Somebody needs to pay for my 15 kids....

[john9blue]

If your only choice is to work or die, that is not freedom. Its slavery.

i wish there was a country where everybody sat on their asses doing nothing all day so people like aafitz could live there and see what happens.

[BigBallinStalin]

If your only choice is to work or die, that is not freedom. Its slavery.

i wish there was a country where everybody sat on their asses doing nothing all day so people like aafitz could live there and see what happens.

I've heard 'traditional societies' (hunter-gatherer) work about 17 hours per week.

Not sure what proportion of those societies actually fit that description, but their members often died too, so there's that as well.


Does 'freedom' from work lead to the 'slavery' of death? Let's vote on its validity!

[Neoteny]

But why do you continue to gloss over the fact that your stance inadvertently supports state coercion and its theft of other people's wealth? Acknowledgement of this fact will lead you to an undesirable yet real paradox from your our humane, satisfying intentions and their terrible consequences. You gloss over this fact in order to justify your faith-based assumptions about people and the markets' insufficient ability to coordinate goods (like charity, etc.) without the need of government. On my side, I have evidence and an appreciation of markets, a healthy skepticism of government, and an awareness of its costs and consequences:

David T. Beito's From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 dismisses many of your concerns.
The Voluntary City has several articles which will instill doubt in your vision of humanity's inability to help others without using coercive force.

Oh, but what of the social costs of government welfare? Why not go beyond our good intentions and examine consequences?
Why not read State Against Blacks by Walter E. Williams and W. E. Williams?
Or Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies or Intellectuals and Society?

Why not become more knowledgeable about the government and markets, instead of adhering to such a mistaken ideology?
(And my stance is supposedly the religious one.)


Your inability to accept the actual consequence of your faith in the state prevents you from seriously criticizing your ideology. This is dangerous because such behavior enables people with many good intentions to advance policies of bad consequences. Such behavior enables politicians to take advantage of such naivety in order to advance their crony capitalist goals. You trust 'us' more than your trusting me, yet magically there's your implicit trust in the government (with its politicians and bureaucrats) to actually achieve their alleged goals of reducing poverty.
(e.g. read Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter, and Randy Simmons' Beyond Politics).

Good intentions plus government institutions often do not lead to your desired consequences, but more importantly, individuals within a market (i.e. in a free society) can more efficiently discover methods for alleviating poverty through gains in productivity, through voluntary exchange, through selection and variation of various means. But with government provision/control, you hardly get such a broad avenue for creating wealth and alleviating poverty--and you get costly consequences which are difficult for the government to correct (e.g. the 'poverty trap' but no negative income tax; the social costs of the drug war; etc.--all of which comes from the voters' good intentions and the state coercion and funding. That abominable and blind religion in the state is the primary obstacle to the advancement of humanity. What barbarism.).


(Also recommended reading: Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails).

Okay. I'm going to respond to this with a request. Here's your chance to shift me a little libertarian. While dropping those books on my ass was cute (and I appreciate the effort to keep this discussion accessible to me), I'm completely uninterested in reading people's opinions on economics and welfare. I have to treat economics like any other field outside my own: I need the consensus. While I'm sure those books reference reviews and meta-analyses, and some may even count as such in their own right, it's in my nature to require the criticism inherent in the peer-review process. A journal article may not be fully accessible, but I can read figures, and I can read discussions and conclusions.

I have limited faith in sociology, and even less in economics, a field with a reputation (deserved or not) for being subject to the whims of the speaker's politics. But in my recent meanderings through the science, I've found reason to be hopeful. So, sustain this!

Is there an economists consensus on state-provided welfare, either in parts or in a whole? What data are there comparing the options? Can you reinforce this with peer-reviewed articles? If there is, why has communicating this fact failed so miserably? Has the economics community learned anything from climatologists? If there is not a consensus, why should I trust you? Perhaps you are smarter than the average voter, but what separates you from the average economist?

I understand that it might be unfair to hold economics to the same consensus standard as, say, climatology, but I'm looking for anything here. A trendline. I also understand that publications that rely heavily on college participation are going to reflect a liberal skew. I will do my best to take that into account. I'd also appreciate some variety of sources; like that UCSD document mentions, there appear to be bastions of conservative and liberal thought within our university system.

I recognize this is the internet and we don't really want to spend all our time converting the nonconvertible, so, you know, two or three decent analyses are probably enough to get me started on my way. I haven't decided if I prefer discussions of current or past policies. Discussions of older situations are easier to distance politically, but may not be relevant. I'll leave that up to you. Extra credit question: what is the deal with actual welfare states like the Scandinavian countries?

EDIT: I clarified that we're comparing state and private welfare here.

[Neoteny]

But why do you continue to gloss over the fact that your stance inadvertently supports state coercion and its theft of other people's wealth?

To answer this more specifically: 2 possibilities. The first is that I'm actually a huge fan of state coercion and theft. The other is that I gloss over that opinion because it is usually irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make, such as the idea that jay_a2j is a racist, a hick, and a liar.