RichardGibbons

Ah, I see. So nothing in the 21st century. Or 20th. Or 19th. Or 18th. Or 17th. Or 16th. Or 15th. You do have one from the 14th, though that one that was plagued by successive massive civil wars. Hmm.... I see where you're coming from.

Good response, Al--it's nice to see a thoughtful conservative comment on this topic.

You mean like North Korea, Iraq under Hussein, Saudi Arabia? I've read some history. From what I recall, there were quite a few states over quite a big time period. Maybe even more than I can count on fingers and toes. So can you help me out a bit, since it's so obvious to you, and you're clearly so well read? Which state do you consider stable, with big inequality, that you consider the best role model to compare your nirvana to?

Don't be short with Cardboard, DooDiligence. I actually enjoy this reasoning. It's kind of like, "I don't understand why you're annoyed that I drugged you so I could extract one of your kidneys to sell on the black market. I'll give you half the profit--that's money in your hand, today! People can live for years on one kidney, and besides, if I had extracted both, you'd be far more likely to die."

Just out of curiosity, why do you think this will save the wealthy from the poor people with guns? Or is it kind of like, those who pay taxes can choose for those taxes to go toward locking up or digging graves for any poor people who are upset that a tiny fraction of the population controls everything?

I enjoy it. Not as much as Black Mirror, but that's a high bar. Nevertheless, be warned, Utopia is frequently graphically violent (not in a deliberately gratuitous way, but rather because it depicts extreme characters and extreme circumstances, and when those things combine, violence is frequently the only way the story can possibly play out.)

Correct, but for a couple minor changes, in bold:

When I see this phrase, I think of this scene from Utopia. This 2 minute scene--so beautiful in such an unusual way--was enough to persuade me to watch the entire show. :)

I think it's pretty reasonable if you are over the age of 50, and either don't have kids, or don't really care about them or anyone else on the planet. Why does it matter to you if you'll likely be dead by the time that billions start perishing as a consequence of global warming? Money today is what matters, not the survival of future generations. (Besides, it gives you a really nice answer to the Fermi Paradox.)

FWIW, Canada already has this system, essentially. The obvious downside for the USA is it removes one degree of checks and balances. RE: "vote based on the leader's stated positions". It would be interesting seeing how this would work in practice, certainly better than disenfranchising all the poor people. (Why the heck don't the rich understand that if you constantly and persistently abuse all the poor people, they will shoot you. Like, dead. Is it really that hard a concept to understand? Do they really have this intense desire to replicate the French and English Revolutions? Those things don't end up well for anyone.) It would be very nice if there were some way to this sort of "stated position" vote as an adaptive test, so each question refine which candidate best represented people's positions. I think both Republicans and Democrats would be horrified by the outcome (because their stated positions probably wouldn't actually be popular enough to win elections), but it would certainly be an interesting experiment to try. One interesting result might be that you could get, for instance, an anti-spending party aligned with progressive social values. Of course, the biggest challenge here, like any polling, would be figuring out the questions. It's clear from numerous referendums that, when it comes to politics, politicians will deliberately chose confusing questions in cases where, with a clear question, the electorate would be likely to vote against the politicians' desires. So, there would have to be a good way to ensure that the questions actually made sense to a normal person.

This is outcome-oriented thinking that I strongly recommend against. Don't think of fire insurance as a waste of money, even if your house didn't burn down.

The average apartment price (not my preferred statistic, but it's hard to find median price) is $562K. The median household income is around $76K, so that makes a 7.4 times multiple. I'd guess an average 2-bedroom apartment would rent for around $2000/mo. So if you assume the average apartment is the average 2 bedroom (which I imagine it's not), you're getting a 4.3% unlevered return on a rental, before you factor in taxes, depreciation, and special assessments. In 2002, that average apartment was sub $200K. It first broke $400K in 2007, and a year ago was just under $500K.

The interesting thing about IP is that it's a total fiction, a very weak artificial monopoly, and China's really shown that. I think there's substantial value in protecting IP, but I also think if US went too hard placing a too high a value on IP during trade negotiations, they'd find everyone abandoning that fiction pretty quickly, resulting in trade wars that would be bad for everyone. Re: "we no longer need allies to fight the communists": Most of the west is allies with US, and therefore they don't need a huge military. If they are no longer allies, I wouldn't expect them to continue to have a small military, and it would be foolish to expect USA to get better treatment at that point. It isn't that long since Germany, Italy, and Japan took over much of the world. Encouraging everyone to massively increase their military to sizes where they become a real threat to the USA, and encouraging them to ally instead with Russia and China seems like a really stupid strategy.

For the same reason you pay for people who don't exercise enough, eat too much, drive poorly, don't go for periodic preventative check-ups, smoke, drink alcohol or coke, ski, box, canoe, eat bacon, play football, hike, collect garbage, donate blood, work as a nurse, doctor, or other hospital worker, work in mines and other heavy industry.... In both the US and Canada, because it is essentially an insurance model, everyone pays for the negative decisions of everyone. The fact that some people like to have sex with different people get checked for STDs doesn't seem that different than me eating bacon and needing to get cholesterol checked occasionally. Also the bigger issue to me is what that "abuse" costs, and it's a bit silly for us to argue about it without a good understanding of the costs. My SWAG would that there's about 10 million people between the ages of 20 and 40. Say 5% of those swap partners a lot, and of those, 10% go to the doctor quarterly to get tested at a cost of $100. Then the total cost would be $20M, which doesn't seem like that bad a deal. Isn't a heart attack from eating too much bacon running in the tens of thousands? You don't need many of those to exceed $20M. (I imagine AIDS is pretty expensive to treat too, though.) They also pay for round-the-clock security for the Prime Minister, because we think it's a good idea to keep him not dead and functioning effectively. If you're going to suggest "not fair" examples, it would be much more persuasive if it weren't the leader of the entire country. (Like say, his wife and kids, who would also probably jump the queue. That would be an awesome political controversy. :) ) That said, my goal would never be total fairness. Naively striving for absolute fairness is pointless--we need to be practical, not live in fairy tales. My goal is to reduce the effects of luck in life, so the people who work the hardest have the best possible chance to get ahead.

Let me make this very simple for you. How are you going to enforce property rights and make murder illegal without a government and a legal system, and who will pay for those costs? In math, the most common way to prove something is true is to assume it isn't true, and then show that that assumption leads to a contradiction. That's why you're frustrated. You've assumed property rights and without government or taxation, and that leads to a very simple contradiction. You really want to be able to say with a clear conscience that taxation is stealing and also want to believe in property rights and basic legal protection. Yet you can't get property rights and legal protections without the government and taxes. Darn. It can be really annoying when you realize that a core belief leads to a contradiction. When people with intellectual honesty run into such a sticky situation, they change their core belief, but in your case, I recommend just waving your hands and whining that nobody's taking your argument seriously.

"Garbage for all" in the sense that it has the same outcomes as the US system, at lower costs. You are right that I give very little weight to anecdotes as opposed to scientific studies with data sets that can show significance. That said, I think that Canada actually has the best of both worlds--everyone gets good healthcare at reasonable prices, and rich, grass-is-greener people can jump down to the USA. And Canada gets to be a freeloader on US medical R&D. It's actually awesome for the rest of the world that Americans are happy being grossly overcharged. This would actually be interesting to test, because preventative stuff is typically very cost-effective. So, it would be interesting to know if the preventative effect of people going to the doctor "too often" actually saves money. Not sure what your point is here. We shouldn't test for STDs? People who enjoy having sex are evil? I actually was curious what the number was here, but couldn't find it in 5 minutes of searching. Thanks for ruining my browser history. :) I'd be totally into trying a small fee for service (small relative to the patient's income), to see the impact on both costs and outcomes. Don't forget doctors deliberately restricting the supply of physicians. It's amazing that with all these factors adding inefficiencies, the US system is over 50% less efficient, isn't it? I agree. I bet this is another "doctor monopoly" thing. Yeah, it certainly isn't perfect. It's just far closer to perfect than the American system.

Sure. Is morality always black and white, or are there ever shades of grey? Am I a slave if society prevents me from raping you and burning down your home? I think there is moral justification for society to prevent its members from doing whatever they want and also making those members pay for it, primarily because there doesn't seem to me to be any reasonable alternative. Are there any rapists or arsonists around here who strongly disagree, and can offer their own solutions?

It's a reasonable question. Part of the answer is that I didn't do it within the American system, and couldn't have done it in the American system. If we're talking about the Canadian system, then there are a few things I'd change, some toward the left, and some toward the right. Another part of the answer is the recognition that people are different, and luck played a huge role in my success--likely more than my own efforts. Like, I was born in Canada, come from a middle class background with caring parents who impressed on my the value of education, I was really good at school, particularly math and science (I was best math student in my city), I had good nutrition, and had few worries about money. All these things are luck. Plus, I know that my personal outcome means almost nothing. So the right strategy isn't to generalize from it. Rather, the right strategy is to try to arrange the system to minimize the effects of luck, so that the people who work the hardest have a chance at the greatest success. Not sure where I said that I wanted more regulations. I largely want regulations of the kind that ensure people get what they pay for in cases where it is unreasonable for individuals to properly investigate whether they would get what they think they're paying for before they buy. (e.g. Someone shouldn't need to investigate every bridge every time they drive over it, nor send their food to a lab to see if it will kill them before eating it). I'm not sure if this level of regulation is more or less than there is now. With a larger safety net and expanded social programs, I think it would be easier to get out of poverty because the statistics show that it is when you compare income mobility across countries and across states. (That said, I don't necessarily think the same about everything in Canada, since there's diminishing returns.) I don't think the reduced motivation is that significant an effect. Pretty well everyone seems to want to get ahead. I think it sucks being poor, and people care a lot about relative wealth. This keeps motivation high in most cases. When they did guaranteed income experiments, the only classes of people who significantly reduced the amount they worked were older teenagers, who spent more time being educated, and mothers who spent more time taking care of their kids. To me, both those outcomes seem good for society, and also don't support the premise that lower motivation as a result of social programs is a huge problem. So I take it from the fact that you're against complications, that you're in favor of a single payer healthcare system? It's far less complicated, collecting the taxes that are already being collected, cutting out all the waste caused by middlemen in the US system, maximizing the negotiating abilities of the single payer, cutting the tie between jobs and healthcare, greatly increasing employment mobility. The evidence I've seen indicates that single payer leads to the same outcomes as the messed up American system, at two-thirds the cost, and you don't get all these people dying because they can't afford medical care, nor bankrupted from some random illness. A no-brainer, right? I agree. Everything should be done thoughtfully, and not to appease some populist sentiment.

Here is what it means to be poor in America, from Scalzi. Certainly not the same as being poor in India, or in America 200 years ago. Nevertheless, I'd greatly prefer not to be there. The biggest problems for me would be the constant, wearying grind, and the knowledge that even if I work really hard, and I'd still have a high chance of never getting out of poverty. In combination, these things would be crippling.

Not so much. Once he's president (and not campaigning), if he says he'll do X, I believe he'll do his utmost to do it, and protests will make no difference. So, a totally reasonable strategy is to do things that will encourage him not to say he'll do X in the first place. (Almost everyone cares about saving face, and I think Trump more than most.)

I suspect the point is to influence policy now. Suppose there's some policy that Trump's just barely on the cusp of implementing. If he believes that everyone who dislikes the policy will just accept it, he might be more likely to pass the policy than if he believes that the people who hate the policy will shut down a major city for weeks and leave him with horrible media coverage. (I have no idea if that works, or if that's what they're really thinking, but it is one plausible and logical reason for protests.)

Somalia. I hear Mogadishu's lovely this time of year. Yep, but the majority wants the insurance. Remember? Civilization?

Living in a country that forces you to buy insurance is a voluntary act also. Your country will also force you not to rape and murder people. Welcome to being a human in the civilized world. You can't do everything you like if a majority disagrees with it. (Well, not without being killed or imprisoned.)

Wow, we should stop wasting all that money on traffic lights, air traffic controllers, IT security. There's so much waste in trying to avoid disasters. Don't bother to maintain those dykes and dams to prevent flooding. Just buy a bunch of mops! Heck, forget exercise or healthy eating--just install personal defibrillators. Short Gold's Gym! Buy Coke! Buy Defibtech! If we follow your suggestion, I imagine we'll be able to free up at least 10% of the capacity of the economy, leading to golden age of prosperity.

Thank you for reminding me of this, rkbabang. You're absolutely correct, and I really needed to keep that in mind this week.