Haven - cutting welfare

Tenshinai wrote:

DDHv wrote:From:

https://www.frcaction.org/get.cfm?i=WA16G06&f=WU16G01

"Beyond the hype of "wealth redistribution" lies a cold, hard economic fact: the greater the freedom of a country, the greater its wealth; the greater a country's government, the greater its poverty."
TAANSTAFL

It often takes decades for policy changes to show the effects. So, is TAANSTAFL true in this?

Someone pointed out that Goedel's incompleteness proof must mean that any policy prescription will have unexpected results. It might be better to aim for goals, rather than to provide specific methods, and re-evaluate results as they occur.

What would a society be like if it required every law or regulation to clearly articulate its goals and be regularly tested to see if it is working? I can only recall one SF story with such a society

Problem with that is that it pretty much ups the workload for the government by at least twice, so, you need a bureaucracy that is twice as big, minimum...

It´s why countries sometimes "testdrives" laws and regulations(or the removal of them) in one or several small regions instead of nationally, because then they CAN do it like that, as they´re testing it on just maybe 1-2% of the nation, making realistic evaluation possible without breaking the backs of the bureaucrats.

The SF story had a very small such testing group, and was enforced by having each law maker's primary vote include a multiplier based on the correctness of his long term thoughts from former votes. No analysis or no testing, no multiplier and the legislator stays on the bottom rung. I wonder how long it would take for someone to work out a way to game the system?

One problem with any such kind of prescriptions is the tendency to add them as extras to existing systems, instead of using them to displace bad parts of the existing systems. It takes effective displacing to reduce the work load.

DDHv wrote:The SF story had a very small such testing group, and was enforced by having each law maker's primary vote include a multiplier based on the correctness of his long term thoughts from former votes. No analysis or no testing, no multiplier and the legislator stays on the bottom rung. I wonder how long it would take for someone to work out a way to game the system?

What a stupid idea. Was any thought given in the story how "correctness" is judged? In the absence of an objective way to determine the correctness of a law or vote, this is pretty much instantly corruptable.

The E wrote:

DDHv wrote:The SF story had a very small such testing group, and was enforced by having each law maker's primary vote include a multiplier based on the correctness of his long term thoughts from former votes. No analysis or no testing, no multiplier and the legislator stays on the bottom rung. I wonder how long it would take for someone to work out a way to game the system?

What a stupid idea. Was any thought given in the story how "correctness" is judged? In the absence of an objective way to determine the correctness of a law or vote, this is pretty much instantly corruptable.

Probably. In the story, there was an objective comparison between prediction and events - no mention of the details of how. This sounds much like our current two-party presidential candidates - no details


From:

http://townhall.com/columnists/stephenm ... sletterad=

There is dignity in work. There is despair in welfare. After three generations of the failed entitlement state, hasn't welfare done enough harm to the very people it was supposed to help?

In engineering training, one thing we were taught is that production must occur before distribution.

There was a cartoon showing, at the beginning of welfare, many people pulling a cart, and a few riding it, while now there are many riding, and few pulling. This must break down

DDHv wrote:...
There was a cartoon showing, at the beginning of welfare, many people pulling a cart, and a few riding it, while now there are many riding, and few pulling. This must break down

We don't know enough about the economics of the fortieth century to make that assumption.

One thing I'd observe is that Manticore has a remarkably generous welfare state by 21st century American standards -- apparently there is unlimited free medical care and free or nearly free higher education, again with very few limits I can see. The fact that in Manticore the franchise is limited to those who have paid more taxes than government benefits (for five consecutive years, if I recall correctly) probably mitigates substantially against any tendency for the voters to vote themselves money.

Manticore seems to be a "radical abundance" society. The basic necessities of life appear to be extremely inexpensive. Labor and high-tech capital (that medical technology, the construction technologies) are quite expensive, but resource costs are essentially zero and the capital costs are sunk costs -- once you have the high-tech gadgetry that lets you build kilometer-tall buildings, you can presumably use it over and over again requiring very little incremental investment. Since most manufacturing is probably extremely automated those high labor costs are most likely noise in terms of actual product prices.

Probably the best analogies in our 21st century world is cellular airtime or internet bandwidth. Once the infrastructure is built out and only a very little bit of competition is in place the prices plummet. Manticore in the 21st century ante-diaspora would have a similar situation for most manufactured goods and consumables -- with the difference that there is no real limit to how much internet bandwidth an individual can consume, but there are real practical limits on how much food one could realistically eat or how many shirts you would own.

I don't know how much sense our concept of "welfare" makes in such an economy. If the basic essentials of life are all extremely inexpensive I'd imagine the challenge would be to keep the providers of those supplies in business and also willing to innovate and introduce new products and services. That problem has apparently been solved in the Honorverse.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:One thing I'd observe is that Manticore has a remarkably generous welfare state by 21st century American standards -- apparently there is unlimited free medical care and free or nearly free higher education, again with very few limits I can see.

Umm... where would you get this idea? The only education we've seen a non-trivial look into is a military academy, and the only health care we've seen a non-trivial look into is of serving officers.

We know prolong is provided by the government to Manticoran citizens, but that's because for a large majority of Manticorans, that turns out to be net revenue-positive for the government (because they're productive workers for far longer).

drothgery wrote:...Umm... where would you get this idea? The only education we've seen a non-trivial look into is a military academy, and the only health care we've seen a non-trivial look into is of serving officers.

Cauldron of Ghosts(EARC), pp 192

“Highly advanced planets like Beowulf and Manticore had extensive and well-funded programs to enable students from lower class backgrounds to attend the finest institutions of higher education.”

Excerpt From: David Weber. “Cauldron of Ghosts - eARC.” iBooks.

I remember in Shadow of Saganami there was a discussion about how the Talbott planets could not afford to provide universal health care, unlike more advanced star nations like Manticore. I don't have an electronic copy so I can't paste it in here...

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:One thing I'd observe is that Manticore has a remarkably generous welfare state by 21st century American standards -- apparently there is unlimited free medical care and free or nearly free higher education, again with very few limits I can see. The fact that in Manticore the franchise is limited to those who have paid more taxes than government benefits (for five consecutive years, if I recall correctly) probably mitigates substantially against any tendency for the voters to vote themselves money.

Actually I believe RFC clarified that what counts is direct government transfer payments, not indirect support.

So depending on how it's implemented that medical or educational support may not count against your taxes for determining the franchise (or at least not 100% of it). If it's a stipend to students that would certainly seem to count or the equivilent of a government funded Health Savings Account; but a scholarship or simply universal health care might not.
Certainly I expect that prolong treatments don't; otherwise the vast majority of people who got 1st or 2nd generation treatment would be temporarily disenfranchising themselves because most 20 - 30 year olds wouldn't be paying enough in taxes to cover the expensive (but free to citizens) treatments in those years. Prolong is (among other things) an economic investment by the government that will pay off much later. (3rd gen treatment doesn't have quite the same problem because people get it so young they wouldn't have the right to vote anyway)


So in theory people could vote themselves more indirect benefits without losing their right to vote (see the High Ridge government's various schemes to effectively buy votes through domestic programs. Couldn't do that if that indirect aid disenfranchises the very people whose votes they were trying to buy ) The scheme isn't so automatically resistant to bread and circuses spending.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:

drothgery wrote:...Umm... where would you get this idea? The only education we've seen a non-trivial look into is a military academy, and the only health care we've seen a non-trivial look into is of serving officers.

Cauldron of Ghosts(EARC), pp 192

“Highly advanced planets like Beowulf and Manticore had extensive and well-funded programs to enable students from lower class backgrounds to attend the finest institutions of higher education.”

That's hardly a guarantee of universal government-funded higher ed (or medical care); it's quite possible (and even likely) that Manticorans who are able to pay have to do so.

IIRC Rivka was attending LUM without using scholarships.

From:

http://constitution.com/governments-don ... mandments/

The paternalism of the state is that of the bad parent who wants his children dependent on him forever.

It would seem that the Haven Legislaturist government is designed as such a co-dependent government.

OTOH, RFC designed the Manticore government to, as several have pointed out, aim for better infrastructure instead of a free ride. Education is free, but the students need to pass their courses, and the courses aren't watered down. Prolong and other health care is free, but the citizens need to work at something useful if they want to eat or vote. Those who innovate are rewarded, instead of people who are just cronies. In RFC's Manticore, we don't see people being paid for breathing or voting for the elites. We see a culture in which there is a strong trend against even the aristocracy getting a free pass. IIRC, there is a comment somewhere to the effect that the aristocracy has a strong tradition of "noblesse oblige," but there are a few who are the most snooty in the universe. Haven started out well, but produced policies that trained people to be proles, and changed into a co-dependent welfare state. Manticore avoided that trap. This is likely in part because of the voting requirement.

Whenever any polity produces too many of either the prole type, or the Young family type, it is in trouble

OTOH, when the majority concentrate on working at their own business, especially on improving infrastructure, you get an increasing spiral instead of the decreasing spiral of co-dependency. Better infrastructure, whether from physical or social capital, makes real costs affordable for people like us, not just for the elites.

Frederic Bastiat wrote:“The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish! If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow citizens to it.”

Bastiat was far ahead of his time in several ways. He was not only an economist, but pointed out other things also.

Look around you, and estimate the percentage of things you can see that are produced and distributed by improved infrastructures such as mass production, not because we are better than our ancestors

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:One thing I'd observe is that Manticore has a remarkably generous welfare state by 21st century American standards -- apparently there is unlimited free medical care and free or nearly free higher education, again with very few limits I can see.

Jonathan_S wrote: Prolong is (among other things) an economic investment by the government that will pay off much later.

Is a government that improves the infrastructure, but in practice recognizes the TANSTAFL principle a welfare state, or is it a canny one