whakahekeheke

Individualism, Elections, Development, and Poverty

posthumanism:

I think this is an overly conspiratorial view of the state. No, politicians are not selfless. Of course our government has its problems with inefficiency and corruption. But we still live in a country where those representatives elected to office are elected.

I wouldn’t call it conspiratorial. I’m not saying politicians conspire to hurt people (some might) or have some big secret agenda or anything. I’m just saying they’re equally human.

Imagine you got a position where you had significant and immediately arbitrary monopoly power. Would you give your family and friends special treatment? Would you seek to keep that power or keep it in the hands of people on your team? Would you give up that power if some economist told you it was inefficient or that someone you didn’t like could do X more efficiently? As you pointed out, power is corrupting (I’d add potentially intoxicating and addictive).

And can you calculate a sum of human values and capabilities a priori? Can you know what’s good for someone better than they know themselves? (Would you be tempted to impose your values on other people?) Can anyone emulate the internal workings of millions of working human minds? etc.

It’s not so much a conspiracy, as an application of humanity to the humans who control, manage, and enforce the power of state.

You voluntaryists seem to have a lot of faith in the ability of people to come together voluntarily, but not in their ability to (voluntarily) exercise their right to vote for representatives. As for the first blogger: as a matter of fact, I do vote for those representatives whom I know favor more socialist policies of redistribution — by, yes, taking my money. The welfare system is far from perfect but I know people who’d be dead or dying without them. I also happen to vote for those representatives who will take money from me to do things like build roads and hospitals and schools. And no, I’m not coerced into it.

Right, so if you had the option of giving that money (which is taxed in a thousand different ways rn) to a more efficient NGO that helped people in a more sustainable and positive way, or help people locally yourself, would you rather do that? If so, the point is that the state keeps people from choosing options like that and keeps emergent institutions like that from growing precisely because it is a coerced monopoly. You may consent, but you don’t have a choice and most people don’t consent and are coerced.

Okay, elections. Majoritarian elections don’t get you a representative government in any sustainable or effective sense. There are four main groups here: (1) voters, (2) elected/electable politicians, (3) unelected government officials, and (4) interest groups and elites. Voters seek governmental benefits for themselves, benefits for their perception of “society,” for their personal identity w/ regards to politics, and their personal attachment w/ regards to politicians. Politicians seek votes and funding/support from interest groups. Unelected officials seek job security and funding from politicians. Interest groups and elites seek services and funding from officials and politicians.

Look at the incentive structure. What you have here is not some romanticized process of national representative government via majority election, but a clear and intense competition for coercive power and thereby the spoils of that power at the expense of productive people. [I’ll do some empirical election modelling in a later blog post].

But! I am not saying you are totally wrong. Power does corrupt and we need a better means of getting rid of that corruption. Yet I don’t think eliminating government involvement to the degree you theorize will necessarily make things all better.

I’d just point out that I’m definitely not in favor of immediately abolishing things like child welfare or universal basic preemptive and vital health coverage. (Things like military spending, corporate welfare, and oil subsidies would be first on the list.) Shock therapy doesn’t work. There has to be a transition so I’m in favor of allowing non-government institutions to grow and/or decentralizing and gradually voluntarizing the valid services currently monopolized by the gov.

Volunteering in communities is well and good, but can it support the nation’s 37 million who live below the poverty level in a way that is both consistent and reliable? 

Volunteering at a local level is exactly that — local. It has a limited scope of effects and limited, differing means (depending, obviously, on the nature of the volunteer or volunteer group) of providing aid. 

First, I believe that statism-corporatism is the root cause of the vast majority of that poverty. As you have a more and more voluntary economy, you have more and more value-maximization and wealth-generation.. and less poverty. This is supported logically as well as empirically.

Second, I wouldn’t be in favor of immediately just destroying all the current welfare systems, rather transitioning into a decentralized and voluntary framework. There would still be international and global non-governmental aid orgs like Red Cross, Salvation Army, Doctors w.out Borders, Meals on Wheels, etc. and they would be better funded as (A) the coercive monopoly would be phased out, and (B) people would have more disposable income which empirically means they give a bigger share to charitable cause.

And local/communal aid is reliable and consistent for most people - from family to friends to community groups to mutual aid societies (which were prevalent prettymuch everywhere before government created the modern insurance industry) to insurance co-ops to empathetic doctors and hospitals etc. There are going to be fewer people to fall through the local cracks when the community is better off, and there are going to be more and more efficient extralocal organizations when there is not a coercive monopoly on those services. And it’s not like zero people fall through the cracks in the current system - I’d argue far fewer would in a more voluntary society.

34% of it is religious aid? Fuck that shit! I don’t want people with a religious agenda helping me out! I’d much rather it be secular! 

Hah, well I would rather it was secular too.. but so long as the organization is doing good - providing food and housing and whatnot - I can put up with some religious pamphlets on the tables.

Conservatives and libertarians love to talk about how “institutionalized, bureaucratic charity programs” like welfare are inefficient. You bet they are — they’re underfunded, corrupt, and mismanaged. Worst of all, they perpetuate the idea that those who need them are frail, helpless, needy, lazy… the list goes on. It has its own way of marginalizing those it seeks to integrate, and this needs work. Serious work. But we live in a capitalist economy, and it leads to massive discrepancies in wealth — which leads to discrepancies in quality of life — and that requires, in my opinion, some form of redistribution. That is, as long as we have this current economic backbone and this kind of government structure that enables the gap between the rich and the poor to be so astronomically wide. Which I really don’t think I am totally down with, but that’s another story for another time.

I doubt it’s actually the “gap” itself that bothers you. For me, anyway, it’s that there are all these people in absolute poverty while other people far out of absolute poverty, demonstrating that the means to escape poverty are there.. but something is keeping the impoverished out (borders and government-corporatist barriers imo). I would be happy if everyone made 100k while the richest 1% got much richer - as the absolute poverty would be reduced the “gap” itself techincally doesn’t matter.

The idea that charity should be left up to the individual is really just a nicer way of saying, “I want to be able to reserve the right for myself to be a selfish dickhead should I want to be a selfish dickhead; no one should ever force me to contribute my hard-earned money to those who weren’t good enough to make a sufficient amount of their own.” I don’t know if those who back this individualist ideology are trying to fool others or themselves, but it’s just dressed-up greed under the guise of “logical efficiency.”

Well I, for one, am thoroughly convinced that individualist voluntarism is optimal for less absolute poverty, less starvation, less deforming and destructive disease, more opportunity, more self-actualization, human development, peace, etc. much moreso net than any statist program, programs that tend towards being counterproductive and/or unsustainable in the long run. I know there is a diversity of opinion and language among libertarians, but that’s what I believe. I could be wrong, but I have studied a lot of arguments and data and I haven’t heard anything that logically challenged that.

Wow, long.