Because the children have no control over who their parents are, and we shouldn't punish with a lifetime of diminished opportunities because their parents aren't as "good" as others.
If we force people to subsidize other people's poor children, we create perverse incentives to have a maximum number of children with minimum personal investment in each. It cannot end well for society.
You have it reversed. Not providing, say, an education to all children, regardless of parental investment, will leave us with a large number of uneducated citizens languishing to fend for themselves. That sounds pretty bad for society.
Not sure how your making the case that educating children ends up poorly for everyone...unless, of course, you mean that it's harder for the wealthy and powerful to control an educated populace compared to an uneducated one.
We're simply not taking, by force, money from one person, to spend it raising the children of another.
No one is forced to live in a country that provides for it citizens. People can always choose to leave if they feel it's unfair to have basic responsibilities like paying taxes.
As government involvement in education has increased, education outcomes have stopped improving:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
I'm making the case that forcing people to pay for the costs of raising poor children will create an incentive for people to produce poor children.
You think there are poor people out there thinking: "hey I can have a bunch of kids and they'll all get free educations, let's do it!" Why would they? So that the kid will grow up and get a great job and support them? That's not so much a get-rich-quick scheme as it is a get-rich-in-twenty-to-thirty-years scheme. Plus you'd still have to raise a bunch of kids, which isn't exactly a walk in the park.
And the evidence is on my side. Increased access to education is associated with lower fertility rates, not higher: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/completingfert...
I think the net level of support people can expect their children to receive from redistributive programs plays a role in their decision to have children when they have low income. It's also important to note that it won't just be schooling if the goal is to provide equality of opportunity. It will have to be food as well, and other resources needed to have an equal opportunity.
As for education and fertility rates, this is not guaranteed to last. Formal education is not something humans were evolved for. But evolution has a way of quickly adapting to maximize its programmed objective: reproduction.
That is not a valid retort. You can't just take a bunch of data points and discard all of them because "evolution has a way". I'm not extrapolating based on this data: these studies show that improving access to education in a wide variety of regions and cultures decreases fertility. These are completely valid statistics and research demonstrating that education is correlated with reduced fertility, you can't discard them with idle speculation. If you have evidence demonstrating your position, we can talk.
https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Gl5Xvza-bmsC&oi=f...
The rise of the welfare state over the last 50 years has been associated with a massive rise in out-of-wedlock childbirth:
http://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/~/media/images/r...
>Maybe an example of a species which, upon a decrease in difficulty raising offspring
It's a well known maxim that feeding animals leads to a population explosion.
2. Just because people are having more out-of-wedlock children doesn't necessarily mean they are having more children over all. It could simply mean people aren't getting married anymore.
3. Your first link has the following quote in the introduction section: "a reasonable reading of the evidence to date is that the welfare system may increase non marital childbearing, but the magnitude of its effect may not be large relative to the effect of other factors in contributing to recent increases in nonmarital child bearing in the US. In fact, the simplest evidence indicates that the welfare system has not been largely responsible for the recent increases in nonmarital child bearing."
4. Feeding animals increases population, but that's not the same as increased fertility. If an animal normally gives birth to a litter of 5, and only 3 normally live to adulthood, but now all five live to adulthood, then population will increase even though each couple is producing offspring at the same rate. And I'd also like something showing that human beings would exhibit the same phenomenon, because human behavior is a complicated thing governed by more than evolution.
2. The fact that an increasing number of people are having children out of wedlock should be very concerning. Many social problems are strongly correlated with high single parenthood rates. The evidence suggests to me that more welfare encourages single parenthood by changing its costs/rewards.
3. Even that finding is shocking in how anti-welfare it is, given the well-documented leftist bias in the social sciences. Even accepting it at face value, it points to a definite negative effect. Over time, it could get worse due to natural selection.
4. I can do some research and see what I find. As for human populations, I think the most likely outcome is that they inevitably reach a state of evolutionary optimal behavior.
I would argue that the harm of redistribution has historically been more than counterbalanced by the accelerating rate of technological innovation, but that the last 40 years suggests that the growth of the harmful effects of welfarism are starting to outpace the accelerating natural-rate of innovation. That's what GDP and income growth figures would suggest to me. Also the explosion in single parenthood.
So don't just write off publicly subsidized education as wealth redistribution!
If it's truly an investment, we could let the student loan market handle it, since the returns (in increased income) exceed the costs.
As for social benefits, I believe the negative effect of encouraging people to have children when they're not capable of personally supporting them, and of reducing the incentive to be productive, outweighs the positive ones.
Before the era of government education, the level of education in society was improving steadily. I don't see history suggesting that society, left to voluntary relationships and income distribution, enters into a downward spiral.
Student loans? I'm talking about primary and secondary education, not college education. I'm assuming you aren't talking about privatizing those and using students loans to funding things, right?
I think you would have a hard time finding any credible sources that indicate public education has been anything but good for the world. Cherry picking historical facts and turning a revisionists blind eye to our country's history won't help. As well, the debate over which LEVEL of government should be paying for education is orthogonal to the merits.
Whether it's a small community, with high levels of income homogeneity, funding the public education, or the federal government, is not orthogonal to the debate on guaranteeing equality of opportunity. The massive increase in government spending (at all levels, federal, state and local) on education is also not orthogonal to the debate.
Several economists have looked at the history of education and concluded that we would have been better off if we never transitioned from nongovernment to government education. The trends in place before public education was created were toward greater literacy and education.
I'm not sure what arguing over the minutia even accomplishes. I feel like I'm chasing a goal post all over my Friday afternoon. Government support for schooling has been provided by every level of the US government stack(municipal, county, state, federal) since WAY BACK, even to colonial times, to varying degrees. Public access to and public funding of education has increased along the way, yes.
Clean water, electricity, a home, education, or any of those "rich people" things. If they did deserve it, they'd have them. Since they dont, they deserve a life of misery, suffering, and edging to destitution.
^^^ If you can understand the above, its the reason why youre on the wrong side of history here. You can couch the discussion as "stealing from the rich"... But in the end, we all should have equal access and usage to the essentials of life. We have more than enough resources; there just being hoarded by greedy people who are great at explaining why they deserve it.
> I don't think opposing forced income redistribution puts me on the side of history.
And here we go again. This is a matter of "How does the government serve the citizenry". And right now, not very well. Government's current modus operandi is to privatize the gains and socialize the losses. In other words, their gains is on the backs of our losses. And from that, we have a legitimate claim on those gains, as they should be socialized as well.
Why? Because people who are rich did not do so themselves in a little bubble. Their successes rest in part on all of us. And it is easy to say, and act, that they need to pay their fair share. And that fair share would be sufficient in providing basic necessities to everyone, regardless of financial need.
People can still make profit, and thrive. I'm not advocating traditional communism. I'm advocating a blend, where the minimums are taken care of. People can still thrive and profit - they just won't be able to stand on our backs for them to get ahead.
By taking other people's income? I don't think that's fair.
>Because people who are rich did not do so themselves in a little bubble. Their successes rest in part on all of us.
That doesn't seem like a scientific way to determine how much one owes another person. In my opinion it's not consistent with the principle of justice. It's a very sweeping generalization.
>People can still thrive and profit - they just won't be able to stand on our backs for them to get ahead.
How would they be standing on our backs in the absence of forcible redistribution?
But you don't ask that when they extract peoples' money on the upswing. Only when I express that "socialism for losses and privatization for profits" do you have any problem with fairness.
> That doesn't seem like a scientific way to determine how much one owes another person. In my opinion it's not consistent with the principle of justice. It's a very sweeping generalization.
You want scientific and fair? We the people should own the proceeds from public lands. And that should be used to bolster lowering costs on food, electricity, water, and other resources.
Instead, our government is making "Deals" like selling whole trees for $3 to a wood cutter. Trees are usually in the range from $1000-$50000 , yet some private entity benefits on public's socialism.
Or we have eminent domain so some company can build something. Doesn't matter if it's not for public works. Again, socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor.
> How would they be standing on our backs in the absence of forcible redistribution?
Well, you seem to be an Ancap type, given your economic theory. Well, they'd just pay people to serve as a private militia to protect them. Like Somalia. Because people with pitchforks would come out, and take care of this and properly distribute.
Yeah, people can be richer than others... But there's a point that fairness surpasses when you have 1 person (or company) that owns an impressive amount of goods. We only look no further than environmental, societal, local, and government destruction due to extreme clout.
I always ask that.
>You want scientific and fair? We the people should own the proceeds from public lands.
The proceeds of public land is not sufficient to pay for a sizeable welfare state. All land in the US is worth $23 trillion. Assuming a tax equal to 3% of its value is levied per year, that would raise a little less than $700 million.
That has to first be spent on the essentials, like interstate highways, federal courts, and national defence. There's nothing left for welfare. Even if there were, it would better serve society to spend it on general goods to boost productivity, rather than private goods for the poor that discourage it.
No I'm not an ancap.
>But there's a point that fairness surpasses when you have 1 person (or company) that owns an impressive amount of goods.
I don't see this being based on a principle of justice. It's just a gut feeling, which will be highly susceptible to our biases.
I personally believe we have a natural right to our private property. Otherwise, why stop at our physical possessions, and not go to our physical body as well?
Healthy adults can stand for themselves, children and the ill need protection.
Do you want to derail the thread just to vomit out slogans we've all heard a thousand times and found wanting?
I disagree with Jabanga but the "market incentive to pay for smart kids to learn" is interesting - I'd say it's also very risky - a poor child's parents don't want to pay for the child's education, they're not smart, they decide to rob people, this isn't good for anyone.
But I welcome the discussion and Jabanga has been polite so far.
No, I don't think he has been. His core premise is, "taxation is theft", that is, providing government services with tax money is morally wrong. From there, he has dragged us all into trying to refute his entirely rationalized ideological structure, which claims descriptively that taxing people and using it to provide services has inferior results to simply privatizing everything.
He's rationalizing descriptive data that don't fit the real world to maintain a strictly normative premise that he believes for strictly normative reasons. He then wants us to spend effort engaging with his descriptive claims as if they were the core matter, or even as if they were real descriptive claims and not rationalizations.
No, if they were actual descriptive claims, and he was actually engaging in consequential rather than deontic moral reasoning, he would notice that his descriptive claims contradict reality and change his mind on the core moral proposition. Instead, he's solid as a rock on his original claim, which means he's reasoning deontically, not to mention fallaciously: Thou Shalt Not Tax, therefore tax-funded schools are inferior.
That's downright rude.
He's entitled to his own normative moral opinions, not his own facts.
I did nothing more than what the parent comment did.
I also don't think we're in a position to judge the full impact of our words on others, so I don't accept your assessment that no minds were changed by the previous discussions.
Nobody's telling you not to express your view. The obnoxious thing is to snidely pretend everyone else has to justify their own positions in terms of your view.
If you want to say, "taxation is theft", just say it, instead of dragging things out from, "Well why should children have equal opportunities to other children anyways?"
I personally think that guaranteeing equality of opportunity will have more negative social effects than positive, by reducing incentive to produce resources in order to provide for one's own children, since one can instead be poor and let the state force other people to pay for their upbringing.
If justice is the greatest happiness for the greatest number, some degree of equitable income redistribution is a moral imperative. The exact degree needs to be experimentally determined, as income redistribution does reduce individual autonomy (which has the side effect of reducing happiness) and incentive to work (which results in less wealth to redistribute). The exact amount is also probably population specific, with cohesive, homogeneous populations tolerating more redistribution.
As for the greater good justification: given income redistribution reduces how much wealth is generated, which you acknowledge, it goes to reason that over an infinite timescale, the society without income redistribution will become infinitely wealthier than the one with. A permanent boost to the exponent of economic growth leads, over a long enough time period, to a cumulatively larger gain for the welfare of the poor than any increase in redistribution could provide them, since the benefits of a permanent increase in the growth rate are recurring.
In the same way that society taxes you to pay for goods and services that others use, others are taxed to pay for services that you use. Society does this because it has been historically more adaptive to make everyone pay for roads, fire departments, and strategic bombers regardless of whether or not they actually want them.
If you don't think people should be forced to pay for things that others use, I challenge you to find a society where this doesn't happen.
There's a reason why certain communities have radically different outcomes. The more motivated kind set their offspring up so that the default outcome is, on average, success. They have to try hard to not succeed.
That is utter crap. They do have to make some bad decisions, but it's not like success is guaranteed for everyone who grows up in a white middle class neighborhood.
His lawyer argued that he suffered from 'affluenza', and he was sentenced to probation and therapy; note that Eric was a repeat offender (having been previously cited for Minor in Possession and Minor in Consumption of Alcohol.
Eric Couch wasn't sentenced to a jail term until he violated the terms of his probation and fled to Mexico.
Success isn't guaranteed, but does everybody get the same leeway as Eric Couch?
You know, if people can grow up in a privileged, middle-class neighborhood, unharmed by want or oppression, work reasonably hard, put in a normal level of effort, make reasonable-in-expectation decisions... and then wind up poor? Something is very wrong.