Hacker News Reader

Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

Having been a US citizen for all of my 60 years, and often wondering "why things so fked up?", I've come to understand or believe this about the US:

If it makes money, it's good, regardless of whether it's good or bad for people or the environment. Once something is making money, it becomes a god-given right (cheap labor, insurance companies as health-care middlemen, etc).

If you propose something that inhibits the above, you will be opposed with all available resources by elected members of government at every level. That people are the ones suffering and electing is a mystery that I don't think I have enough remaining years to understand.

View on HN

Being opposed by elected officials is one thing. What truly baffles me is being opposed by the very people that are adversely affected.

Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!?

Many policies are literally convincing poor families that it is in their best interests to help support the frail legacy of billionaires. How!?

In the US, poor people don't see themselves as poor. They see themselves as not-yet-rich (or, at least, not-yet-middle-class). Therefore people oppose taxes on "the rich" because they think that those taxes might one-day affect them, even if that expectation is unrealistic in the extreme.

> In the US, poor people don't see themselves as poor. They see themselves as not-yet-rich

This is repeated so much that I'm starting to distrust it...

Maybe the people don't agree with you about what's in their best interests. You may believe that getting money for yourself regardless of any other consideration is the "correct" way to vote, others may disagree.

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs. Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

> Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs.

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get the tools necessary to secure and maintain sufficient initial and recurring quantities of material assets; jobs with sufficiently high pay do that (but not all jobs have sufficiently high pay), though they aren't the only thing that could.

> Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

No, jobs are created by paying people to do work. There are several ways government can cause this to happen: the simplest and least prone to be misdirected is to simply pay people to do work. Among the more complex, less reliable, and more likely to be manipulated to maximize profits to other people and minimize jobs to the people for whom the goal is to secure jobs is creating financial incentives to capitalists in the hopes that it will result in them creating jobs that lift people out of poverty.

Different jobs have different levels of net benefit to society.

For example, paying someone to "dig a ditch and fill it in" gives that person work, but is a zero-sum game - transferring wealth between people, but not increasing the total pie (total well-being), at least without considering the psychological benefits of work (and exercise!).

Similarly, breaking windows to create jobs for window repairmen creates jobs, but is negative-sum - it benefits window repairmen, but reduces the overall pie. You're better off just giving money directly to window repairmen.

In contrast, some jobs increase the total wealth, and can benefit both the worker and the people willing to pay for the work to be done. (positive sum).

Some positive sum jobs increase the total wealth more or less than others, for the amount of money invested (spend $, increase total wealth .01% or 1%?). Similarly, the net gain of the work may be distributed differently (does the purchaser receive more of the surplus or the provider?)

Focussing purely on jobs ignores the cost - is society better off if I employ 100 people to do the work that 1 person could do?

The best way we've found to increase total well-being is to allow people to pay for what they want, rather than having government mandate jobs to be done.

> The best way we've found to increase total well-being is to allow people to pay for what they want, rather than having government mandate jobs to be done.

The widespread unrest with classical, 19th Century, capitalism and it's displacement throughout the developed world with modern mixed economies is a direct result of the untruth of this claim.

A lot of evidence seems to point towards the best way being a combination of the two.

No. Jobs are created from demand. There will be no cars sold in a neighborhood, and therefore no car dealerships, unless the people there have money to buy a car.

If there are people there to buy a car, or a gallon of milk, then "job creators" will compete against each other to hire enough people to satisfy that demand, and take a cut of the revenue.

No one creates a job. They satisfy a demand. Steve Jobs supposedly said something like we didn't know we wanted iPhones until we saw them. That may be true, but lucky for Apple that there are enough people with disposable income to buy those iPhones.

Demand comes first, then jobs to satisfy the demand. And if a "job creator" could satisfy that demand without creating jobs, he'd do it. "Job creators" are not in the business of creating jobs, they're in the business of making money, however the current economic environment allows and demands.

The only person who creates a job is the guy buying a pack of cigarettes while filling up his car.

> No. Jobs are created from demand. There will be no cars sold in a neighborhood, and therefore no car dealerships, unless the people there have money to buy a car.

True. But when people want a car, they do not automatically fall from the sky.

> If there are people there to buy a car, or a gallon of milk, then "job creators" will compete against each other to hire enough people to satisfy that demand, and take a cut of the revenue.

And that is how they become rich. People get a car, or a gallon of milk. A few people get jobs selling cars or gallons of milk. Someone gets rich by opening a store or a car delership.

> Demand comes first, then jobs to satisfy the demand. And if a "job creator" could satisfy that demand without creating jobs, he'd do it. "Job creators" are not in the business of creating jobs, they're in the business of making money, however the current economic environment allows and demands.

And when we have all our needs met without people having to work, with machines taking care of all our necessaities, we can think about Universal Basic Income. Until then, enterpreneurs will have to hire people to satisfy demand.

One of the biggest job creators is the government, with their massive budget and public needs. Yet we are often lead to believe that we need to coddle billionaires so that they feel comfortable enough to lay a few more jobs, and starve the federal government of revenue and responsibility.

Indeed. The government, like poor people, spend every dollar they take in, which allows that money to circulate. To use a cliche, a billionaire can only buy so many yachts, pieces of art or gold bricks; at some point, the excess is going to land in an offshore account or otherwise be underutilized.

Billionaires grudgingly create jobs.

Every dollar given to the billionaire is willingly given because the product benefits the person at least a dollar (net benefit to both parties). "The excess" is invested in other companies that produce other things people are willing to pay for.

Every dollar the government spends was taken from a taxpayer (cost one dollar), to provide a product people are not willing to pay a dollar for. This yields a net loss to society, unless there are positive externalities.

This does not mean that there is not a role for government spending (a "common good" in the economic sense is undervalued in the market).

Voluntary exchange produces an economic surplus, increasing net well-being. Government (compulsory) spending hopes to create an economic surplus, but is largely not measurable.

Sometimes the aim of government spending is simply transfer of wealth, which is zero-sum (or maybe negative sum, if it damages incentives to produce, or maybe positive sum if the recipients can use it to greater net benefit). Again, hard to measure.

>Every dollar the government spends was taken from a taxpayer (cost one dollar), to provide a product people are not willing to pay a dollar for. This yields a net loss to society, unless there are positive externalities.

Except this is not entirely true. Much of modern income is rent, and people are willing to buy things like defense, and much of the "dead weight loss" you are talking about is offset by collective barganing power.

Edit: Like you say, it's complicated and I'll be the first to admit don't understand how it all works but I don't think soaking the rich works well either, in theory or in practice, and government is often unfairly maligned by people who have something to gain by less government involvement.

They're also created by removing roadblocks for job creators to create jobs. Think about all the people who were locked into jobs because switching or going out on their own would require unaffordable (or perhaps unobtainable) health insurace for themselves or family members with preexisting conditions.

Poor people are lifted out of poverty when they get jobs.

1) A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2014/home.htm

2) Reducing poverty can work by either raising the baseline (stronger social safety net, maybe higher minimum wage, better overall vocational education, etc) or by moving individuals into other economic classes (getting people (better) jobs). I think raising the baseline is probably a better approach, since it works by not leaving people behind.

"A bit over a third of poor people (in the US) do work"

This sentence is not wrong but a casual reading of it would nearly always give the wrong impression. Herein "poor people" is defined as the people below the federal poverty limit. For one person this is around 12000 dollars.

A more common sense colloquial definition of poor is those barely scraping by based on the cost of living in their area of residence. In most of those considered poor by that broader definition someone in the household is working. Remember that not all families have both partners working.

Your perhaps too brief post would inspire people to think that most people by the common sense definition of poor are in fact unemployed which is not correct.

> Jobs are created by incentivizing job creators.

Which of course leads to the question: Which job creators are most effective at providing sustainable (and, ideally, scalable) employment for the available talent pool?

They're not called 'job creators'. Jobs don't need creating. They're called self-interested capitalists. They aren't 'creating jobs' out of the goodness of their hearts. They sometimes, to a certain limited extent, require labour in order to maximise their profits.

> If it makes money, it's good

Pretty much the broken window fallacy on a societal level, perpetuated by a system that commonly grants political influence on a per dollar, rather than per capita, basis.

The way I understand it: Making money means a market, market mean consumer choice rather then government mandate, which means freedom.

The fact that there is no actual consumer freedom in many cases like this one never manages to register; the idealism of a free market overrides all the messy practicalities of reality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com